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Post by Wolfgang on May 23, 2019 12:53:18 GMT -5
Looks like most of the people who have responded to her are recommending A Wizard of Earthsea. FWIW. It's probably not applicable to Le Guin, but I usually look up the author and make sure whatever book I'm planning to read isn't one that's in the middle of a series, e.g., Book 2 of a trilogy. My wife wanted to read a Margaret Atwood so she picked up The Year of the Flood, not realizing it was the second book of a trilogy. She was so confused. So, she googled and discovered her mistake so she returned the book and picked up book #1, Oryx and Crake, and suddenly everything made sense. And then there are other issues. For example, Philip Roth wrote a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated novels with the same character, Nathan Zuckerman, starting with The Ghost Writer (1979) to, eight Zuckerman books later, Exit Ghost (2007). So, do you start at the beginning or is it okay to pick any book in the Zuckerman universe? (I started from the beginning.) In other cases, it might be best to start off with their short story collection, just to get your feet wet. In many cases, writers have written far stronger short stories than novels. Also, I find that picking up the most monumental or well-known work by an author isn't the best place to start until you sort of get to know the author's "language" and thematic expressions. If you pick up an author from the beginning, you realize that they often write about the same themes and each subsequent book adds variations to it, so reading seemingly unrelated books in chronological order may be more rewarding than jumping around. Anyway, I always have difficulty picking a book to read for a given author. I just usually start from the beginning. You'll always find gems there anyway. I'm going to re-read Ian McEwan's first short story collection First Love, Last Rites (1975) this weekend because it's been over 20 years and I've forgotten most of the stories. I do remember it being very powerful.
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Post by Wolfgang on May 23, 2019 13:05:38 GMT -5
My wife is currently reading the entire short story collection of Mark Twain. Really awesome stuff in there. I don't know if he had ADD or what but he wrote in a variety of styles and was quite experimental in the genre. Sometimes, they didn't make a lick of sense but they were always entertaining.
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Post by mikegarrison on May 23, 2019 13:18:17 GMT -5
Looks like most of the people who have responded to her are recommending A Wizard of Earthsea. FWIW. It's the obvious choice. The most accessible. As I said, though, I also quite like The Lathe Of Heaven.
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Post by mikegarrison on May 23, 2019 13:21:13 GMT -5
For example, Philip Roth wrote a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated novels with the same character, Nathan Zuckerman, starting with The Ghost Writer (1979) to, eight Zuckerman books later, Exit Ghost (2007). So, do you start at the beginning or is it okay to pick any book in the Zuckerman universe? The Earthsea books are more like this, but probably still best to start with AWOE.
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Post by mikegarrison on May 23, 2019 13:32:29 GMT -5
From Wikipedia:
Modern writers have credited A Wizard of Earthsea for introducing the idea of a "wizard school", which would later be made famous by the Harry Potter series of books, and with popularizing the trope of a boy wizard, also present in Harry Potter. Reviewers have also commented that the basic premise of A Wizard of Earthsea, that of a talented boy going to a wizard's school and making an enemy with whom he has a close connection, is also the premise of Harry Potter. Ged also receives a scar from the shadow, which hurts whenever the shadow is near him, just as Harry Potter's scar from Voldemort. Commenting on the similarity, Le Guin said that she did not feel that J. K. Rowling "ripped her off", but that Rowling's books received too much praise for supposed originality, and that Rowling "could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt."
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Post by Wolfgang on May 23, 2019 18:14:16 GMT -5
From Wikipedia: Modern writers have credited A Wizard of Earthsea for introducing the idea of a "wizard school", which would later be made famous by the Harry Potter series of books, and with popularizing the trope of a boy wizard, also present in Harry Potter. Reviewers have also commented that the basic premise of A Wizard of Earthsea, that of a talented boy going to a wizard's school and making an enemy with whom he has a close connection, is also the premise of Harry Potter. Ged also receives a scar from the shadow, which hurts whenever the shadow is near him, just as Harry Potter's scar from Voldemort. Commenting on the similarity, Le Guin said that she did not feel that J. K. Rowling "ripped her off", but that Rowling's books received too much praise for supposed originality, and that Rowling "could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt." I like this.
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