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Comment by timvdalen | Hacker News Reader

I recently read A Wizard of Earthsea, and it took me a really long time to get through. Here's what I noted down after reading it:

I can see why (and how) this book is important and good, but it just took me so much active effort to keep reading it.

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I had a similar experience -- I did enjoy it, and some parts genuinely moved me, but the last quarter or so was a bit of a slog.

I will say that I enjoyed her short stories a lot more! They are fairly deep but entertaining, with great twists and surprises

The Wind's Twelve Quarters is a good anthology -- in that one, I liked The Rule of Names, Semley's Necklace and The Word of Unbinding. In another anthology (I think), Direction of the Road -- phenomenal. Most of these can be found standalone online

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas I enjoyed less, but it's a short read and fairly important culturally. NK Jemisin, who wrote the Broken Earth trilogy (highly recommend it), wrote a sort of tongue-in-cheek short-story in response to it called The Ones Who Stay and Fight -- also worth reading.

I fully support the recommendation of Le Guin's short stories! Too bad they are easily forgotten over her novels. (I guess a novel, as a product, is easier to review and to advertise?)

My favourite collection is "The Birthday of the World", especially the stories "Solitude" and "Paradises Lost". (Maybe skip "Old Music and the Slave Women". It builds on other books and is incomprehensible without them; or at least it was to me.)

I've only read two works from her, both short stories: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", and "The Building" (in the "Redshift" anthology). Both were absolutely terrible, shockingly so. I really don't get why people like her work so much.

The whole reason I started the novel was because I listened to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas on Levar Burton Reads. I'll give the other short fiction a shot, thanks for the suggestions!

I had a really different response to that Jemisin story. If you’re going to invoke comparisons with another work, your work should be on the same level. For me it was a bit like Sharknado making a Jaws reference.

I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.

The most interesting part of the book is how at the start you think "this is going to be a book about how Capitalism sucks and is bad for people", but it turns out that the Communists also sucked although their suck was spread out more evenly among the people.

> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people —TDJP

I would say the first few chapters (or rather the first few chronological chapters dealing with his childhood) were a uphill climb. But after that its quite fascinating, and I felt the story was pulling me along forward.

I can't understand this perspective! Even now, just flipping through random pages looking for a quote, I keep getting sucked back in!

> He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.

> He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"

> "When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"

> He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."

----

> "I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."

> "Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"

> "With the annihilation of space."

---

How can you not want to read more!? I remember this, such a moving scene, from reading it many years ago. The entire story is rife with tension, in my view. How will the destinies of all these many billions of people unfold from the actions taken in these few moments by these few people?

It has a lot of focus on personal interactions, down to very small details.

The degree to which people find it engaging or boring varies a lot from person to person.

Now read the Left Hand of Darkness!

I think you'll find the pacing much improved.

This is the first and only book of Le Guin that I have read. And I just couldn't grasp what was all the hype about this book. It could be because I was expecting a "typical" science-fiction book. Or maybe I was not mature enough when I read it. Maybe I should give it another shot now that I am older :).

Yeah I've always found this one out of place when listed among other big classic sci fi books. It's tonally very different, slowly paced, focused on different concerns than is typical for the books it is usually grouped with. It's a great book in its own right but not a great introduction to her for people coming from or looking for sci fi.

Interesting. I've made it a point to try to make my way through the canonical sci fi greats over the years, and I'd put Left Hand of Darkness near the top. It's kind of because of that tonal difference: there's something about the way it's written (sort of anthropological / travelogue style) that makes me feel truly immersed in the culture and world being described, in a trance-like way, even though the book itself doesn't have particularly exciting events in it.

It may be that it hit me at a particular time in my life: I read it in my early teens and the way gender was expressed in the novel, the sort of tidal shift between masculine and feminine based on circumstance, really spoke to me at a time I was figuring all that out in my own psyche. I wonder if a lot of the gender exploration in the book may seem more trite and typical now.

I mean I think it's an incredible book, in exactly the ways most "great" sci fi is weak. But I've come across enough people bouncing off of it to put some thought into why and this is my most charitable take on why so many sci fi fans don't love it.

I'm with you. I read it a year ago and found a lot of it dull as dishwater. And the ending very predictable. It was ok. I, like you, just don't understand the hype.

I loved left hand, but good pacing is not exactly what i would associate with it.

Huh. Every few years when I pick it up, the writing just pulls me straight through.

Not saying there's anything wrong with your experience (certainly it's taken me active effort to read some highly recommended books, and sometimes I've quit), just that this is likely a YMMV thing.

I had an opposite experience. I read it in my 30s and loved it so much. My only sadness was that I didn’t get the chance to read it when I was a young adult.

Earthsea reads like the boring retelling of a great story.

That's funny, my favorite thing about her writing is the calm, quiet narrative style. Kind of the opposite of the Brando Sando approach.

The calm writing style of John Wyndham is something I like about his stories. Not much in the way of action or excitement, no vast space opera with many winding threads. World changing ideas, writ small.

Trouble with Lichen is about the discovery of a genuine anti-ageing compound, but we don't see anyone super old or the social consequences. We see the people who discover it and what they choose to do next.

The Outward Urge is a family with several generations of spacemen in it. Nothing really happens, we see a few snapshots of their lives through the decades as human activity out in the solar system increases.

The Midwitch Cuckoos is perhaps the most unexcitingly told story of its kind (no spoilers) but not worse for it.

Web is a nice weaving of ancient curse and modern (1950s) civilisation into an imminent end of the world.

exactly the opposite for me - i love pretty much everything she has written, but the earthsea cycle is by far my favourite. it captivated me from book 1, and just kept going from strength to strength (the second trilogy is somewhat different in feel from the first one, but just as good in its own way)

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