Why should this be your next book club pick? Well, for a few simple reasons:
- This is classic fantasy and you need to recommend it to everyone who didn't read it as a child.
- It's incredibly well-written and has such an intricate world and plot.
- Le Guin is an early author who valued diversity in her writing and world-building, so the characters in this book are quite diverse (especially when you take into account when Le Guin was writing).
- There are life lessons to be learned from this book and they aren't too heavy-handed.
- It's a fairly simple and accessible read, so you should be able to recommend it to anyone who is able to read chapter books and they should understand and will probably enjoy it.
If you want to run a book discussion centered around Le Guin's work, look no further than her website - it's a treasure trove of information about the author, her life, and her work. There are interview and speech transcripts, documentaries, links to her blog, lists of awards she won (and she won A LOT of awards) and endless amounts of things to parse through. Here, I've gone through some of what I think will be most fruitful to a book club discussion and linked it in here.
Author information: (taken from the author's website) Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and four grandchildren.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms.
Most of Le Guin’s major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise. Her poetry has drawn increasing critical interest; Finding My Elegy, published in 2012, contains poems selected from previous volumes and new work.
Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA’s Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and in 2014 the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Le Guin has taken the risk of writing seriously and with rigorous artistic control in forms some consider sub-literary. Critical reception of her work has rewarded her courage with considerable generosity. Harold Bloom includes her among his list of classic American writers. Grace Paley, Carolyn Kizer, Gary Snyder, and John Updike have praised her work. Many critical and academic studies of Le Guin’s work have been written, including books by Elisabeth Cummins, James Bittner, B.J. Bucknall, J. De Bolt, B. Selinger, K.R. Wayne, D.R. White, an early bibliography by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell and a continuation of the bibliography by David S. Bratman.
Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with sporadic forays into political activism and steady participation in the literary community of her city. Having taught writing workshops from Vermont to Australia, she is now retired from teaching. She limits her public appearances mostly to the West Coast.
As of 2015, Le Guin’s most recent publications include The Unreal and the Real, 2012, and Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, 2015. Forthcoming in December 2015 is a new volume of poetry, Late in the Day. For the full list of the major publications see this website: About Ursula K. Le Guin
Book inspiration: (from Ursula LeGuin's Magical World of Earthsea by Jan M. Griffin) LeGuin began the trilogy when a publisher invited her to write a fantasy for children. She developed the novels from stories she had written earlier about the world of Earthsea, a place similar to the United States in climate, and much like the fifteenth century in its lack of industrialization.
(from Schmoop) To understand A Wizard of Earthsea, we have to start by imagining what the world was like before the Harry Potter books (we know, tough to imagine). Before the first Harry Potter books came out, if someone said "wizard," your mind probably didn't pull up the image of a teen at a boarding school. Back then, when someone said "wizard," instead you likely pictured an old man with a long white beard and immense wisdom – you know, someone like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings.
Now imagine this: it's 1968, practically eons before Harry Potter, and Ursula K. Le Guin wants to know where all these old men with long white beards and immense wisdom come from. Are they born like that? Or do they start out as regular kids who have to learn how to be wise and grow beards? This curiosity on her part turned into the inspiration for A Wizard of Earthsea.
In Earthsea, Le Guin takes a wizard who will one day be immensely powerful, and she shows us what he's like as a teen and a young man. In her story, this wizard childhood isn't terribly pretty: Ged will one day be wise and kind (and bearded), but when he's young, he's reckless and proud and gets into some terrible trouble that follows him and nearly kills him.
That's a pretty serious change to the fantasy story, but Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea makes several other interesting changes to the old fantasy standards too. Take this example: you know how in many fantasy stories, we have good and evil fighting, and (hopefully) good wins in the end? Gandalf (and team) fights Sauron, Aslan defeats the White Witch, and Harry Potter takes care of Voldemort – all great. But in A Wizard of Earthsea, it's not so easy to defeat evil. In fact, it's sometimes hard to even know what's good and what's evil in the first place. In that way, it's a lot like Le Guin's other works, which tend to avoid simple moral victories. At the end, it turns out that what we thought was evil was really a part of the hero himself.
Discussion questions:
- Le Guin is known for choosing not to write about the conflict between good and evil, but about inner conflicts. In A Wizard of Earthsea, do you feel as though the inner conflict of Ged outweighs the outer conflict against the being he's summoned? (This interview may provide more clarification on her views of Good vs. Evil)
- How do you think this book has influenced changes in children's literature and the fantasy genre in general?
- When this book was published in 1968, diversity in fictional characters was not nearly as discussed as it is today. As an American author, Le Guin was writing during a time of change regarding racial acceptance (the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, just a few years earlier). Why do you think Le Guin chose to include characters of color in her books at this time?
- Ultimately, Ged is forced to deal with the demons inside and to confront the consequences of his actions. As a reader, how did learning the true nature of the being Ged summoned change your perceptions of the story and of Ged?
- In the book, names are of huge importance. “Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.” Do names in reality hold power? Does giving your name to someone show some level of trust in them?
- How do the various communities and lands differ from each other? Which land and culture did you connect most with? Which land and culture was most shocking to you?
- Why do you think this became a fantasy/children's classic?
- Have you read this book before? How was this reading different from previous readings?
- “The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.” How does this quote apply to Ged? Does it apply to Vetch or Ogion?
- (quote taken from Jan M. Griffin's work, as mentioned earlier) Earthsea revolves around the principles of Taoism. As a self-proclaimed Taoist, LeGuin manufactures a world based on two of the main principles of Taoism: 1) the theory of inactivity in which one acts only when absolutely necessary, and 2) the relativity of opposites which is the belief that opposites are interdependent, and their interdependence results in the equilibrium. Where do you see these principles of Taoism in this book? Are there any characters who you see as opposites, and therefore interdependent?
- Le Guin is also known for her love of Native American legends, as well as Norse Mythology. How have these influenced her work in this novel?
What did you think of this book? What kinds of things do you like to talk about during book discussions? What is your book club reading next?
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