I was really excited for the release of that omnibus, I remember actually marking it on my calendar lmao and then I physically handled it and realized it was too big to actually hold and read.

I checked it out from the library instead and spent a day leafing through it admiring the illustrations and reading some of the additional stories and afterwords that I hadn't seen before

I liked that series. It was so subtly different from standard sword-and-sorcery genre, even though Ged is himself a formidable warrior.

I was just gifted the first book of the series. I’m looking forward to reading it after seeing some of the praise it received recently.

I enjoyed this review and thought the point about "whiplash" with Tehanu was well observed.

I read Tehanu roughly when it came out, so I'd have been about 18, having read the others much earlier. I was annoyed and disliked it due to the tonal change.

I re-read it again a year or so ago along with the short stories and The Other Wind. I loved it. Nothing had changed - except me, of course.

The (also awesome) writer Jo Walton wrote a great celebration of Ursula Le Guin's life. She wrote in part:

She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field… Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.

https://reactormag.com/bright-the-hawks-flight-in-the-empty-...

The last Earthsea book change its world in a way which is unique (or at least rare), even in fantasy series. I won’t say it here for spoiler reasons, but it’s really quite wonderful. The whole series is absolutely worth reading.

Fun fact: she coined the word Ansible. I had no idea until reading one of her books recently and thinking "Ansible? Like the software?"

I have the omnibus edition that they have in this review. It is a gorgeous book, although still likely not as lovely as Folio Society's https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/books-of-earthsea.html. The paper is very white, with the reading light behind it is almost a bit too white/reflective. But great in ambient light. Charles Vess' illustrations are amazing, although there are just too few of them. I got spoiled at his glorious and PLENTIFUL work on Sandman and Stardust. Nevertheless, excellent packaging for incredible series of stories.

Loved these books.

Did not love the television mini-series.

I may just get that book.

I have the Frankenstein book, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bernie_Wrightson_s_Fran...

Author used to be an Emacs maintainer, FYI.

I have that omnibus edition. Bought it for my then newborn daughter when it came out (and have them all in eBook format as well), but have yet to convince her to read it, or The Hobbit.

It is available as an eBook in the UK for a ridiculously cheap £5.99.

https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-books-of-earthsea-the-co...

https://www.gollancz.co.uk/news/2018/10/17/the-books-of-eart...

First 2 are great, next 4 start to drag but you’re invested in seeing how things turn out.

As a kid, I always thought the “coding language” of magic in these books was clever. If you know the secret magical name of something, then you can speak to it in the secret magical language, and it will obey you. This had built-in scaling limits, for example, if you wanted to conjure a tidal wave, then you would need to know the names of millions of droplets of water, which naturally means a tidal wave spell is going to be very long winded and difficult to cast.

I'm apparently the only person who thought these books were terrible. I barely made it through Wizard of Earthsea. The story meandered and never seemed to go anywhere, the names were unpronounceable and unmemorable, and the ending dragged on and on.

> If you were 11 years old in 1991, and read the four books in quick succession, you’d get whiplash when you got to the fourth one

I was 11 in 1991, but I didn't get to Tehanu until I was 12. It was definitely whiplash inducing though.

The best thing about this illustrated edition is Le Guin's own comments written in the past few years reflecting on these books.

Here's the last paragraph on her comments on Tombs of Atuan. (Um, spoilers, I guess.)

> Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.

one of my favourite things about the first earthsea book in particular is that it is a remarkably thin book with the feel of a much larger novel. I have never seen that particular feat managed better - the book is not particularly dense in the hard-to-read sense but she makes every word count and builds up an extremely rich world in a short novel.