Ursula Le Guin Books

It's hard to remember the exact timing of when I read some books, but I know that Earthsea was one of the first, if not the first book, that ended up sparking a love of reading.

That's true of most SF. SF is primarily political, and has been since at least the late 50s. Although there is hard SF where the science leads, it's rarer - and less interesting - than SF which uses imaginary technologies to set a scene for political and social questions.

IMO Le Guin and someone like Heinlein were two sides of the same strand of SF. They're both moralists rather than technical speculators, and in their own way they have a didactic streak where the morality is confidently presented but rather heavy-handed.

Although The Dispossessed is politically ambiguous, it's not ambiguous in an unfathomable, mysterious, or unconfident way. Neither is something like Dune, or the Culture novels. Or even Asimov's Foundation.

Part of the appeal of these authors is that they seem quite sure of their political and anthropological sophistication. While their characters may struggle, there's never a sense the authors feel they could be completely blindsided by human or alien anthropology, or steamrollered by non-human influences which are incomprehensible and impossible to deal with.

It just always seemed super boring, generic, and unimaginative.

The hobbits were also annoying for their one-dimensional, unimaginative, middle-class goodness.

Yes, I know that one of the reason Tolkien's work seems so cliche today is that so much has been influenced by it. Maybe if I'd read it in the 40's or 50's I would have been more impressed, but as I read it in the 80's, by then it already seemed way too generic.

By the way, I am a fan of much older literature than Tolkien, and consider the works that Tolkien himself was probably inspired by to be much more lively, authentic, imaginative, and well written than anything Tolkien himself ever wrote.

Things like, say, Apulius' The Golden Ass, a Roman fantasy written in 1 AD.

Or virtually any of ETA Hoffmann's work -- written in the 1700's.

Or Poe (1800's), or Blackwood (early 1900's), or the French Decadents (1890's), etc..

Or the Mahabarate (400 BC or even earlier).

Or The Count of Monte Cristo (1800's).

Etc, etc, etc..

These works were all far more complex, three-dimensional, interesting, and insightful than the "good guys team up to defeat the big baddie" that LoTR brought.. not that that in itself had to doom Tolkien's work, if he had any profound insight in to the world or the human condition, or maybe had some interesting characters, but he had none.

To me Tolkien has always just seemed as nothing more than a mediocre writer who'd have been long forgotten if there was any justice in world of literature, but instead he's gotten massively overrated.

I have a bit of a different take on Le Guin's best work.

I couldn't get into The Dispossessed. I will try again, though.

I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was a teen and loved it, struggled with the second book (Tombs of Atuan) at the time, then returned to it 30 years later and now consider it a truly fine work as a story and an examination of religion, tradition, and belief.

Immediately after completing Atuan, moved on to the third book in the series (and liked it) but couldn't get into #4.

I've also enjoyed her short stories, including some of her later collections from the 1990s and 2000s.

A book that is seldom on her "best of" lists but I think should be there IMHO: The Beginning Place. I first read it in the U.K. (with an alternate title, Threshold) but returned to it recently and it holds up in terms of the story and the scope of the strange world it describes. Not to mention the beauty of science fiction or literature or prose or whatever you want to call it in the hands of a master:

The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea. His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.

This might be a bit controversial since we're in a thread about how good Le Guin is, but in my opinion "Name of the Wind" perfects the subgenre. It is the same basic story, even based on the same magic system, but it's more polished, emotional, mysterious and riveting.

The Harry Potter books are amazing, I don't think they're related to Earthsea in any significant way though. There's a reason that they're so popular, and it's not that everyone has bad taste.