The Earthsea cycle is very, very different from Tolkien and GRRM.
The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole and individually. The point of view character in each novel is a young person, passing through late adolescence and into adulthood. In this respect it is more comparable to Harry Potter or The Dark Is Rising or perhaps His Dark Materials fantasy series.
The world LeGuin builds for the story is incredibly rich and unique, like Middle Earth and the world of ASOIAF, but the structure of the stories are considerably simpler.
However, the "inner life" of the stories are richer. Like the Dune series, the novels of Earthsea spend a lot of time deep in the perspective of a few key characters. I think it is one reason these novels are so hard to film in a satisfying way.
That said, where Earthsea really distinguishes itself from almost any other fantasy series, is the fact that LeGuin came back to the series much later in her life and added two more books. These are set in the same world but regard it with different perspectives of age and gender.
The original trilogy is classic fantasy about Our Heroes who are uniquely gifted and ultimately save the day and pass into legend. The final two books are about what happens to those people when they face the complicated and unsatisfying future: their personal gifts are no longer powerful, and their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by a new generation... and ultimately found to be not only flawed, but awful. Some of the things they defended were not absolutely good after all, but the lasting artifacts of earlier selfishness, bias, and bigotry.
I resisted reading these later two novels for a long time because I enjoyed the purity of the stories in the original trilogy. But now having read them all, I find I can enjoy them in related but still somewhat separate ways.
If the later two novels don't sound like your kind of thing, you could read the first three now, and then visit the last two books a decade or two (or three) later. That would align your perspective with LeGuin's when she wrote them.
I'm nearly 40 and I really enjoy Tehanu and The Other Wind much more now than I did when they were first published. I find it much easier to identify with the aging characters. I think TOW is now my favorite of the series.
That sounds a little like "Children of Dune" vs. Dune. Paul is a likeable hero in Dune, but then you get to see the downside of his revolution and all the negatives of prescience.
Definitely up there with Tolkien and much better than RR Martin.
“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
My favorite fantasy series was/is the Inheritance cycle ( Eragon ). My grandpa also really liked the series as well and binged them. So to me ( I was in middle school ) and my grandfather, they were all very interesting books to read!
Weren't they written by someone in the 16 years old range? They were not good books but it is still impressive for a teenager to have the discipline actually create a finished work. They definitely played up that angle when marketing the books.
Tolkien has perhaps the richer universe, but GRRM is all about the people. And to me, that's what truly fascinating. All the characters are interesting, and relatable in some way (even those that are evil, or very different).
It's hard to fairly compare someone like GRRM to Tolkien. Writing technique and fashion has changed a lot since back then, Tolkein didn't really have a previous Tolkein to inspire him, and their motivations were completely different.
Go further back to authors like H.G. Wells, and most of the characters didn't even have names (War of the Worlds and The Time Machine had very few named characters, for instance).
Honestly, the Earthsea books were decent, but I didn't think they were anywhere near Tolkien. Tolkien gives you the feeling that there is an entire world waiting just around the corner. Earthsea feels like a shell that you are exploring. Like it doesn't really exist, it just appears when you show up, almost a hollow feeling where the characters don't really exist but are paper cutouts. I read all 3 and enjoyed them, but just not as good as some others and I thought the world was a bit lacking.
There is something about reading your first Tolkien fantasy book around 13-15 that just feels different. If you had read any of the Tolkien facsimiles at that age (Shannara, Wheel of Time etc) you may feel the same way. But if you reread those books now, you may feel different.
And I personally found the first book (wizard) decent, but the sequels were pretty meh (imho). And even with the first, I found the climax pretty meh too (and saw it coming a mile away).
I think what you're perceiving is Tolkien's world-building ability. Given that that was his greatest strength and unique as it goes, I don't think the comparison is quite fair. I mean, he submitted Silmarillion drafts for a sequel to The Hobbit before doing Lord of the Rings. I can't imagine any other fantasy author ever living up to the bar he set on that axis, it doesn't mean they can't be better in other ways.
There are 5, though admittedly there's a long gap between the first 3 and the last 2 (Thehanu and The Other Wind), and not insignificant stylistic change. There's also the short story collection Tales from Earthsea.
Tales from Earthsea gives a lot of context to the realm and introduces an important character in the plot of The Other Wind. I took it to be the fifth book in the series with TOW #6.
Tolkien defined the ur heroic fantasy genre influenced by by lord Dunsanny and others and of course actual myths - until recently Tolkien's translation of Beowulf was the standard text at uni.
Howard is more pulpy swords and sorcery with some horror he actually rewrote some westerns as Conan short stories. And Tolkien started work on what became LOTR etc before ww1 well before Howard.
No mention of Brandon Sanderson and the Cosmere novels? Instead of a single fantasy world, you get a whole universe!
"All of the books share a single creation myth (though not all cultures are aware of it), a single cosmology, and are connected by an overarching story." [0]
Sure, one could argue that it's still not fully-formed, as it's still in the process of being written. But the same could easily be said for A Song of Ice and Fire.
The Stormlight Archive quickly won a place in my loved series category. I don't think I devoured any book from last year as quickly as when the latest entry in the series was released.
One of my favorite things about Brandon Sanderson is that he proactively engages readers (/u/mistborn on Reddit), and he gives regular status updates on his writing progress. I highly value transparency from authors.
I'd never heard of Earthsea, but the article managed to catch my interest. I'm adding it to my queue.
Brandon Sanderson is an interesting case; I have only read the Stormlight Archive books (and his wrap-up of Wheel of Time), and though I can totally see his appeal, I would also totally disagree that he belongs up there with the true greats, at least currently.
Reading his books, I feel like I'm in some kind of Marvel universe, complete with quippy dialogue and 'coolness' that to me gives a stink of 'commercialism' that I can't get past.
In the Stormlight Archive, Shallan is the best example of this: Her dialogue is so forcedly hip and witty that cringes abound whenever I read it. To me, it ruins the whole atmosphere and I feel like I'm in a plastic universe, rather than a living breathing one.
His worldbuilding is great, but his worlds are devoid of authenticity IMO.
Within the cosmere universe, there is a one off novella that Sanderson wrote called "The Emperor's Soul". It is quite good, and it won a Hugo award.
I very much disagree about his worlds lacking authenticity. It seems you have some strange suspension of disbelief resulting from Shallan's dialogue (which I find is true to her character and upbringing). I agree some of the writing for dialogue is "off", but I feel much of this results from Sanderson's pace of writing.
You are right that worldbuilding is his strongest attribute. His characters are getting better and better and Stormlight's are his best yet (imo). Keep in mind that he is still evolving and he is prolific. He generally releases 1+ books every year while still being a professor. Martin's books are really solid, when he ever writes them..... Remember this is his opus after a lifetime of writing. (I personally think his Fevre Dream is a great book)
Her wordplay often feels weak (though "hip" seems like an odd way of describing it), but you could probably fit all of it in one page and there are over 2000 pages in the first two books. If you feel disinterested after reading 2000+ pages I'm not inclined to say you should read the next 1000+ page book, but others should note that this is probably not a common opinion. (Shallan does suck the air out of the first book to some extent, but she's great in the second IMO.)
Take this line of dialogue (don't remember whether it's from the first or second):
"Well, she wanted me to get married too", Shallan said. "So I wouldn't call her sexist. Merely... Jasnah-ist?" She paused. "Jasnagynistic? No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?"
Now, without devolving into debating the anachronicity of the terms used here in general - this is a good example of what I am talking about, and perhaps 'hip' was the wrong way to word it, but it goes beyond mere 'bad wordplay' for me. If you can read the above without cringing, all the more power to you. For me, passages like these completely break immersion and leave me wondering whether I'm reading some kind of bad fanfic. And unfortunately, yes, that does color the rest of the reading, because trusting the author to be competent is (at least to me) an important part of staying immersed. And, thusly let down by Sanderson, my mind moves onto the other things that can be seen as flaws.
That being said, I don't feel disinterested: He has several good qualities as a writer. But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either. In the words of Francis Bacon, his books are to be "swallowed", not "read wholly, and with diligence and attention".
If you're cringing at it, I think you must be getting more from it than I am. The only thing I get out of it is the surface level pun, so I feel the same way as with pretty much all of his other puns: slightly baffled as to why they're included. With this one (though not most others), it feels like there might be a second level that English/Literature majors might get around etymology, but if so, I miss it entirely.
Sanderson also clearly gets many orders of magnitude more out of "word shape" than I do, so he might just really like puns. I've also never translated that quote to any of the various forms of sigals Sanderson defines in the series; if you do so, it might well be breathtakingly beautiful.
> But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either.
Forty years later Star Wars hasn't exactly fallen out of favor. Ignore the stilted dialog...it has a "robot" which is really obviously just a trashcan. Mark Twain's books contain a lot of colloquial dialog which is very much not "soaring prose", and they remain popular a century later. Which is not to say that I think Sanderson will be a hot read in eighty years, but I doubt Jordan or Martin will either. While the average library system presumably has a copy of The Dispossessed at one of its branches, the average branch has zero copies IME.
All of which is totally tangential, I just couldn't let it go (and I tried).
Being occupied with word shapes and word plays is fine! You and several other replies to that post focused on the word-play part of it, as if that was what I was reacting to, and I understand that, since I didn't really give you a lot more to work with. What I tried to bring attention to, however, was the way in which sentences like that break immersion. To me, a sentence like this takes me away from the fantasy world that I have so far been presented, and into some kind of (sorry I keep using this example, but it's really how I feel about it) Marvel movie where our heroes are engaged in friendly banter, or to some tumblr fanfic. That could of course be a problem with what I am expecting going into his universe, but I believe it is more of a problem of Sanderson not taking the time to properly refine his ideas before committing them to paper. Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing. That doesn't excuse it for me, though.
I am not looking for soaring prose - Mark Twain is great partly because of his ability to maintain the illusion of a rustic backwater society and the people within it. Star Wars is similar: When they stay within the expectations set up by their own universe, it's great! Trashcan robots are part of this! But as we have seen, whenever the dialogue takes you out of the universe and reminds you this is an illusion, fans do react ("I don't like sand...").
I also recognize that this has evolved way beyond where it started and this interaction on HN has influenced my thoughts about this. So I won't pretend what I'm saying now is 'what I had in mind from the beginning'.
You mean "breaking the fourth wall" a la Deadpool? He at least skirts that line in some places (e.g. Wit/Hoid/etc.). I'd probably class those parts similarly to Shallan's puns: Moderately annoying but tolerable due to rarity.
Or maybe some super-set incorporating both the flat word play and "breaking the fourth wall" all with other willful discarding of immersion? I can't think of anyone else who goes as deep and long into fantasy as he does, and then occasionally casually discards immersion simply to wink at the reader or make a (weak) joke or whatever.
I'm not a fan of this either, though it doesn't happen often so I find it tolerable. That very rarity, though, particularly in combination with the breaks in immersion always seeming gratuitous, does make it feel like an unforced error on his part. If someone's not sold on the 1000 other pages, adding less than five pages of immersion discarding humor seems unlikely to sufficiently sweeten the deal.
> Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing.
I assume his prolificacy hurts the quality of his prose (though that's very much a pass/fail sort of thing for me; he passes, so his prolificacy is a pure win for me), but what I'm talking about (and maybe you are as well) seems more like what I'll describe as "Get an [expletive] editor." In some ways he seems particularly egregious, as I don't know if even one percent of his content feels like it needs to be excised, and what does feels like it could go for free.
Edit: Reading your sibling comment, I'm probably off-base with the above.
> I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
The dialog generally "feels" reasonable to me, but that's obviously something where tastes strongly vary. One note. Looking at:
> No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?
I, at least, don't know anyone who talks like that. Which is not to say it's good, just that describing it as "hip" does seem quite curmudgeonly :)
I thought it fit the character. I'm not really fond of shallans parts of the story, although I do think they are getting better, but dialogue like that was not out of place. If I recall correctly she has quite a bit of internal worrying and external commentary about how she constantly talks like that, and views it as a negative near the beginning of the books
After many years with more serious read I got back to fantasy in September by starting with Wheel of Time, then all of Cosmere books where I finished Oathbringer just weeks ago with some 10 first Discworld books in between. Sanderson isn't perfect, but his writing improved immensely with each new book. I wouldn't really recommend anything other than Stormlight Archive and might be Mistborn era 2 unless person want to be very Cosmere-aware though.
Still his problem with Shallan is pretty much the same as he had with Mat in first of his WoT books and basically with every other witty character in every of his earliest books. He just wasn't good enough for writing some types of characters, but still tried to include them regardless. I think everyone will agree that he actually become better at this since most of people I talked with enjoy Hoid in SA.
I don't try to justify it, but I think it's not that easy to fix character like Shallan since her character was well defined in first book released in 2010. I guess what we can see in Oathbringer it's attempt to do that although not very good one.
Thanks for the input - though I feel like Shallan is just symptomatic of a larger problem, I could also be wrong and I will give him the benefit of the doubt and keep reading SA.
I would certainly recommend finishing SA since I personally got as much of enjoyment out of it as I only had from ASoIaF. Also I would recommend it even more if you're on first book or not yet get to Shallan's back story in second since a lot of things will make more sense once you know it.
I would want to answer more, but I really want to avoid spoilers. Though I absolutely love her backstory and character development even if I really dislike writing of her in first book.
Now that you point it out, I definitely remember the quippy dialogue from Oathbringer. You should give the original Mistborn trilogy a go or the Reckoners series.
One of the reasons he's my favorite author is that he 1) pumps out solid books almost yearly and 2) his series are very different even though they're all fantasy.
I have heard this sentiment before, and unfortunately I am not convinced that the obnoxiousness of this character was intentional rather than accidental. I don't have much to back this up: basically my hypothesis is that Sanderson is trying to pander to a specific audience, to whom the witty banter he is attempting is appealing, and genuinely attempting to make Shallan 'cool' fits with this hypothesis. Furthermore, as others have also mentioned here, his other attempts at similarly witty characters have also been flawed, so there's that.
Did you get through the second book yet? I pretty much hated the first half of book one when shallan showed up due to way she spoke and acted, but the second book goes into much more detail about her baggage. Other characters also have in universe reactions to shallan that are smiliar to yours
I did read the second one, in fact one of the most jarring passages I found (see sibling comment above) is from this book, so I don't think learning about her backstory solved this issue for me.. But I see you and several others have made this same point so maybe I'm being curmudgeonly.
I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
Absolutely. I've found I have a really hard time with how he writes action as well. I always feel as though he's describing someone playing a video game.
I recently picked up the Way of Kings but found the way he described the action/fantastical elements really jarring. It was like he felt he needed to spell it out rather than let the reader discover it organically. I've been told I need to struggle through though as it's supposedly a great story.
Might I guess that you are avid gamer or was one before? Since I had exactly same feeling when I read Mistborn and didn't find agreement on it with some people who are far more into books rather than games. Though I didn't have same problem with any other books probably because they have less action scenes.
All his magic systems have well defined mechanics and strict rules behind them so it's kind a expected and I feel like somebody who used to play a lot of games see through it more easily. Whatever it's good or bad depend on your own preferences in fantasy.
Personally I see this as a good thing since opposite would be ever repeating contrived coincidence of just-one-another arcane trick rediscovery. Probably these limits on what magic can or cannot do is one of things that make him improve his writing.
No, but once he start to introduce some "magic" mechanics he literally describe it in details: how exactly it's works and looks like as if he was describing politicking. Also I took "magic" into quotes since in Cosmere books for the reader (!) it's always more like set of additional physics-like laws of world mechanics rather than some mystery.
This is of course a matter of taste, but I really dislike this approach to magic/alchemy that Sanderson has. He's explained it before in an illuminating article [1] about his classification of magic systems in "Soft" (less explained, more arbitrary) vs "Hard" (more logical, there are clear/mechanical rules), and how he prefers the latter. I respect this, but I dislike it. To me, magic isn't rational or logical, and overexplanation ruins it. I prefer Tolkien's subtle approach that magic is unexplained, part of the song that made the world -- and in fact, to some of his characters "magic" is a puzzling word.
"Like a videogame" is an apt description of Sanderson's approach, and not my thing. Even Jack Vance's magic system of memorizing spells, used in his Dying Earth stories and said to have inspired the Dungeons & Dragons RPG system, is more mysterious and mystical than Sanderson's. Which is the way it should be!
It doesn't really work that way in practice, though. Not in Tolkien or in other good fantasy works.
Good "soft" magic is mysterious and often unreliable. It sometimes comes with a price. Main characters often do not understand it and cannot use it, or they misuse it to terrifying or hilarious results (e.g. Cugel in The Eyes of the Overworld).
The supernatural must be unknowable, otherwise it simply turns into the natural.
As you posted yourself it's matter of taste, but I for instance simply can't stand another "Gandalf come and save the day" situation because everyone except very good authors heavily abuse such tropes.
I perfectly fine with this kind of stuff in something like Discworld because of nature of these books and how I read them, but for epic fantasy with more or less serious themes I expect events to have logic behind them. Sanderson's books still have mysteries, but they just served by the ways other than generic "magic". So there is plenty of things to make theories about during and after reading.
Yes, of course, it's a matter of taste. I can't argue beyond "I like reading this and dislike reading that".
Ultimately, to me, literary fiction is NOT like programming, and it's not as easy to explain what works and what doesn't. Mystery and ambiguity are bad things in code but good in literature.
Which brings me full circle to why I dislike Sanderson's approach :)
Yeah, getting too far into the weeds is a quick way to make someone feel like they're reading a D&D rule book, especially if many pages are spent explaining rules that ultimately have no effect on the story.
At worst it turns your exciting adventure novel into a textbook for arcane effects practitioners.
But by Sanderson's First Law, if it were in an appendix he wouldn't be able to use consequences of the rules in the story. Imagine I Robot if the laws of robotics were an optional appendix (although not quite that extreme).
FWIW, I didn't find it over-explained, but I tend towards systems naturally.
He does tack on an appendix, which adds in even more details. I personally like it, but I suppose I was also the kind of kid growing up who would be okay reading D&D rulebooks. :)
Or just stuff the rules in a fun footnotes when necessary. I've always been a fan of that technique personally, although I understand it is generally discouraged.
I think that example is kind of right about Shallan, but I can't think of similar analogues in any of his other books. Though I don't really care for the newer steampunk mistborn trilogy.
Actually I thought most of the standalone short stories in the cosmere book itself were pretty great.
Sanderson is good, but not quite what I'd call great. I recently read the Stormlight Archive (I'd tried Mistborn years ago but didn't get into it) and enjoyed it. But it was the kind of enjoyment where I was very engrossed while reading the books but didn't find myself thinking about them very much afterwards. He's not without novel worldbuilding ideas, but, thematically, the books don't do a whole lot that I haven't seen before. Though that did start to change a bit with Oathbringer, his most recent book.
I also admire his obvious and sincere efforts to include non-neurotypical characters in the series. He specifically thanks people he consulted with about this in his acknowledgements. The Stormlight Archive includes, among its main and secondary characters, people with depression, PTSD, and autism. I think it's great that he's giving people who have those, especially kids and teenagers, a chance to see themselves as heroes in an epic fantasy series. The depictions aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, and they avoid some common pitfalls. Nobody gets superpowers from their mental illness, for example.
(I'd tried Mistborn years ago but didn't get into it)
Sanderson appeals to readers with certain sensibilities. The rules of his world always make sense, and things follow those rules, even including the magic. There are lots of readers for whom this is a great boon, because otherwise, magic feels like mere plot convenience and deus ex machina.
I picked up Warbreaker early last year when a copy was on sale. I had never heard of Sanderson before, but I've been hooked since. I then read the Reckoners series followed by the Stormlight Archives. I'm currently reading Elantris.
I find his single universe building and the "rules of the Cosmere" draw me in more and more to his work. With the first couple of novels I didn't realize this was even going on; but as individual books they still were great standalone. As I became aware of the ties between the books I've just been more drawn in. These are some of the only fiction books where I find myself wanting to go back and re-read so that I might pick up on things I missed the first time through.
the first Mistborn trilogy was fantastic, I'll credit, but his later books were terrible. "Shadows of self" was genuinely so poorly crafted that I couldn't read it. It wasn't just rote, but unmotivated.
He has the capacity to be a good author, but, he is spreading himself way too thin. Classes at BYU, Stormlight, Mistborn, games, the rest of the Cosmere stuff. It lacks focus, and honestly that universal creation myth is a shoe-in.
Compared to Le Guin, Tolkien, Martin, Jordan, his worlds just lack focus. If you read fantasy for the big themes, like the reckoning of how religions fit into society and what value they provide, you can get them from Sanderson's books. But if you read them for the craft of language, the dialog, and have any credulity, it is hard to countenance where he's taken the series.
tldr; I enjoyed the hell out of Mistborn, but his later books have been a real disappointment, and I'm awaiting a return to form when he gets his priorities straighten out.
Speaking of Sanderson, I'm a big fan of his initial Mistborn trilogy (from which he takes his reddit username), haven't read the second set though. It had by far the most unique fantasy universe magic I'd seen.
Tolkien's prose isn't biblical so much as it's imitation-Nordic, maybe. If you want biblical, read Blood Meridian. It's in fact so biblical that scholars use it as a reference when they translate the original text into contemporary English. It's also biblical in a much deeper sense, but that's a different point.
You might like Gene Wolfe, especially The Book of the New Sun and the Latro series [1].
The Book of the New Sun is technically sci-fi, but in fantasy trappings, set in a future world in which the sun is slowly dying out, and humankind has mostly lost their knowledge of technology. It's dense, filled with sly little narrative puzzles that are left for readers to deconstruct, and it's beautifully written in a mannered, intentionally archaic style.
The Latro series, starting with Soldier of the Mist, is a historical fantasy about a Roman soldier who suffers from retrograde amnesia, so he must continuously write down what happened the day before. (It came out decades before the movie Memento.)
I second this endorsement of BOTNS. It is the best fiction book I've ever read. I think lobster_johnson's description here is a great meta-summary. For the sake of brevity I will curb my impulse to vomit up heaps of sycophantic praise for this book. I highly recommend it if you're up for an intellectually demanding read.
There are levels and levels to what's going on in the writing. The early chapters are there to set up that he's lying to you, in a way that's heavy handed and devilishly subtle at the same time. Reading Gene Wolfe is like playing a poker game with the author, and no matter how hard you try to pay attention sometimes you look down and chips are missing, like Penn and Teller were just "explaining" a magic trick to you. It's frustrating and difficult and fantastic all at the same time, but obviously not for the same market as someone expecting a typical coming of age fantasy novel.
I know this is leaning into off-topic territory so I promise not to do the fiction-debate-thread thing, but a lot of readers (myself included) disagree with the suggestion that he ever lies to the reader. :)
I'll be honest, it doesn't get any less rough, but eventually you learn to accept that you can't understand everything that the narrator has to tell you the first time you read it. Only after reading the whole story was I able to unwind the complex layers of context that underpin the protagonist's narrative from the very first page. It is worth the effort IMHO.
Not really, but it has enough memorable scenes and ideas that you will want to read it again in a few years, and you will then get a lot more out of it, assuming you are anything like myself.
There's something about Gene Wolfe's writing that just blows me away. Like sometimes, I think I want to try writing my own novel someday. But when I'm reading Gene Wolfe, I'm just embarrassed at the hubris. It's even more humbling when you learn he did most of it while holding down a full-time day job.
While reading BOTNS I had a synaesthesic experience where reading the words felt like I was eating meat, rich roast cooked til it was falling off the bone. I read somewhere that Wolfe, rather than coining new words, searched the Oxford English Dictionary for obscure and forgotten words and used those instead.
Can you help describe it? I'm currently reading the hobbit, but i'm reading it in German to learn the language, and I'm constantly thinking that there's subtle things I'm missing out on as a non-native speaker. If you give a brief explanation it would help me look for it as I read.
Wizard of Earthsea was the first Sci-Fi/Fantasy book that I found difficult to follow.
This was because a printer's error caused the pages to be bound in the wrong order. I don't usually pay attention to page numbers, so it took me a while to realize this. I thought I was losing my mind until I noticed the numbers weren't in sequence.
To this day, I can't tell you what was going on, plot-wise.
I owned and read pretty much all of The Eternal Champion "sequence"[0] back in the 80's. Sure, some of the prose wasn't exactly slick, but I found them deeply satisfying and a damn fine fun read.
I recently read the Elric books and loved them. A friend said they're the written expression of an airbrushed 70s conversion van, or some heavy metal album cover. They're rough, but alive in a way eg. Sanderson can only glimpse.
Also, Gloriana was great (very different from Elric).
In this vein, Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is probably my favorite; it's direct and raw, like a bare knuckle punch in the face :).
> the written expression of an airbrushed 70s conversion van, or some heavy metal album cover.
Were you aware that Moorcock wrote, performed and toured with Hawkwind in the 70's and 80's? Also Hawkwind's 1985 "Chronicles of the Black Sword"[0] album is largely inspired by the Elric tales.
I've been to see Hawkwind live around 25 times, so I have a bit of a thing for them and Moorcock. If you ever get the chance you should go see them because Dave Brock sadly isn't getting any younger.
It's not surprising that Moorcock likes Le Guin's work, since at least some of his objections to Tolkien are ideological (others are, of course, stylistic), while Le Guin is closer to Moorcock's viewpoint.
Still on the 2nd book. Just love how he obfuscates so much of the plot and drips it out very sparingly, while focusing very heavily on character development. It feels like he is comfortable at revealing details at his leisure rather than clumsily throwing predictable tropes at the reader.
Book two is very intense and gripping, but it features a different cast of characters from the first which some people find jarring. The third book returns to the characters from the first, and is definitely where most people find that they've really gotten sucked into it :)
It is very jarring, that's why I love it. He isn't at all bothered about following generic fantasy patterns, it does seem like a labor of love in that he just does what he likes when he likes. The only weak part I felt so far was the culmination of Book 1, it could have been better I guess.
Cloud Atlas stands firmly on its own, I should re-read it at some point. The movie (also a one of a kind, it staying reasonably close to the source material and being one of the most expensive independent movies ever) keeps popping up on Netflix too.
The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole and individually. The point of view character in each novel is a young person, passing through late adolescence and into adulthood. In this respect it is more comparable to Harry Potter or The Dark Is Rising or perhaps His Dark Materials fantasy series.
The world LeGuin builds for the story is incredibly rich and unique, like Middle Earth and the world of ASOIAF, but the structure of the stories are considerably simpler.
However, the "inner life" of the stories are richer. Like the Dune series, the novels of Earthsea spend a lot of time deep in the perspective of a few key characters. I think it is one reason these novels are so hard to film in a satisfying way.
That said, where Earthsea really distinguishes itself from almost any other fantasy series, is the fact that LeGuin came back to the series much later in her life and added two more books. These are set in the same world but regard it with different perspectives of age and gender.
The original trilogy is classic fantasy about Our Heroes who are uniquely gifted and ultimately save the day and pass into legend. The final two books are about what happens to those people when they face the complicated and unsatisfying future: their personal gifts are no longer powerful, and their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by a new generation... and ultimately found to be not only flawed, but awful. Some of the things they defended were not absolutely good after all, but the lasting artifacts of earlier selfishness, bias, and bigotry.
I resisted reading these later two novels for a long time because I enjoyed the purity of the stories in the original trilogy. But now having read them all, I find I can enjoy them in related but still somewhat separate ways.
If the later two novels don't sound like your kind of thing, you could read the first three now, and then visit the last two books a decade or two (or three) later. That would align your perspective with LeGuin's when she wrote them.