This is the first entry in what I'm going to try and make a little series
of, summarizing the books I've read since the last update, alongside some
brief thoughts on each work. These are just those since the beginning of
2025.
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
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> Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)
As the name suggests, this is an anthology collection of all the Earthsea
novels, namely:
* *A Wizard of Earthsea* (1968)
* *The Tombs of Atuan* (1970)
* *The Farthest Shore* (1972)
* *Tehanu* (1990)
* *Tales from Earthsea* (2001)
* *The Other Wind* (2001)
Quite a lot to get through, but it was an absolutely lovely time. I wish
I'd cottoned on to Earthsea when I was younger --- the first three books
especially would have been *completely* up my alley as a kid, and I kinda
wonder if the more sober feminist outlook of the latter three would have
set me on a better path in life. Probably not! But a Worm can dream.
*Tehanu* takes quite a unique approach for fantasy literature in that it
isn't even really about magic (though there's some), so much as one woman,
a widowed farmer's wife that actively chose that instead of the glory she
could have had (who was the protagonist in *The Tombs of Atuan*), and
ex-Archmage Ged's flailing attempts to reckon with permanently losing his
magic in the end of *The Farthest Shore*. The two, naturally, end up in a
romantic relationship; this was unfortunate for me, because while I
genuinely loved how *Tehanu* moved the focus to everyday domestic life, I
have simply never liked reading about romance --- it evokes strange and
uncomfortable feelings. Likewise with sex, unless in a very specific
mood. But despite that, I did appreciate it's reanalysis of the world Le
Guin wrote nearly twenty years before, finally addressing the implicit
gendered power imbalance of the older books (women are forbidden from
being formally trained in magic, village witches forced to pass on what
little knowledge they have from one generation to the next --- "weak as
woman's magic, wicked as woman's magic" is a cliché phrase in-universe).
*Tales from Earthsea* is a collection of short stories, written as a way
to return to the world after another decade spent away from it. These
were pretty fun! And then *The Other Wind* is a classic send-off: the
world is changing, forever; the dragons are leaving; the mistakes of the
past, made by wizards who didn't understand what they were meddling with,
finally and permanently undone.
Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings
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> Abu'l-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (1010), trans. Dick Davis (2006)
This was perhaps a little bit of a slog. Not by any fault of the
translator --- Davis' choice of translating it as a *prosimetrum*, a
mixture of prose for exposition and rhyming couplets (which the original
consisted of entirely, fifty thousand verses' worth) for dialogue and
notable scenes, was both a more economical use of his and the reader's
time, but also thematically appropriate, translating a work of medieval
Persian literature into a common format of medieval literature in the
West. At the same time, it remains a very long work (811 pages), produced
in an alien cultural context, and by the end I was dying to move on to
something a little more digestible.
The sorts of stock phrases used by Ferdowsi (tall as a cyprus tree, pale
as a Greek's face, this fleeting world) give a really interesting little
window into his world. Other things that stood out to me when reading it
were how much emphasis is placed on *maces* as a weapon of the nobility,
more so than swords, especially in earlier stretches of the work.
There's a certain amount of cultural values dissonance a modern reader is
likely to experience, when trying to engage with it --- repeating patterns
of talking about how king Khosrow or Bahram or Yazdegerd or Kavus or
what-have-you has seated themselves righteously on the throne; the divine
*farr* (a mystical light of royal justice, no real parallel in European
myth) emanates from their face; they dispense gold coins on the poor and
the needy, and all is well in the world. And then in no time at all the
text moves to discussing how they have become unjust and cruel. Gee,
fellas, maybe monarchy has some issues as a form of government, don't you
think?
Some notable episodes (do note the romanizations here come from Davis'
translation, and might not match those found elsewhere):
* Kay Kavus at one point was tricked by demons into tying eagles to a
throne, and trying to fly to the sun. He crash landed (alive) somewhere
in "China" (which in the Shahnameh is an indistinct region vaguely east
of Iran, often actually Turkey; the Perso-Turkic war of 588-589 is
conflated as involving China, with the son of Bagha Qaghan being the
emperor), and had to be rescued by the great hero Rostam (who lived an
exceedingly long time).
* Gordyeh, sister of Bahram Chubineh (a military leader who revolted
against the throne, shortly before the Muslim conquest of Iran) had a
habit of wearing men's armor, and at one point killed someone with a
lance. She's pretty cool.
* Bahram Gur is maybe the most valorized king in the entire poem, after
maybe the mythological world-emperors from Fereydun and earlier. Which
only makes it more jarring that, as is told *in the same work praising
him*, he murdered an innocent woman --- the harpist and singer Azadeh,
who he owned as a slave. He took her hunting, bragged about his skill,
and she responded that the greatest thing would be to turn a male
gazelle to a female, and vice versa; so he shot off the horns of a male,
and shot two arrows into the skull of a female, that they might look
like horns. Azadeh was distressed by this, and the furious Bahram
trampled her beneath his camel, such that "blood spurted from her breast
and arms."
Never is it implied that this was even slightly wrong to do.
2001: A Space Odyssey
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> Arthur C. Clarke (1968)
Although this was released *after* the (considerably more famous) film of
the same name, *2001* was actually written in tandem with it, in direct
collaboration with Stanley Kubrick; though some parts were rewritten in
response to the film in the time between their publication. I liked it
well enough to plan on reading the sequels --- nothing super stunningly
out-there for a modern reader, a real 60's-ass work of science fiction,
but in part that's because it popularized the themes and tropes it
contains. A fun read.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
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> Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)
Not a full book, but a short story --- yet I read it as a single eBook, so
it goes here all the same. A really poignant work, with some rather vivid
and beautiful language ("The air of morning was so clear that the snow
still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the
miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky."), full of color and
imagery. And this only makes the wretchedness and cruelty which follows
strike all the harder. I can see why people still talk about it so often.
