I have read both Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind, though only once thru each. Tehanu I have read twice, and am eager to get to it again. It's been a while, but I seem to remember a couple of short stories scattered in other collections, but maybe I'm confusing that with the stories in Tales of Earthsea.
I have been reading the original trilogy, and am almost to the end of The Tombs of Atuan -- Tenar has just escaped the from the earthquake-driven destruction of the undertomb. It is very interesting to encounter her as a young woman again, to think about the person Le Guin is describing, and translating that to the older farmwife I will encounter again in Tehanu. When I read Tehanu the last couple of times, it had been almost a decade since I'd read the trilogy. It will be most interesting to jump into the story of Tenar and Tehanu so soon after The Tombs of Atuan. If I weren't such a stickler for reading series in order, I might skip The Farthest Shore for now and jump right into the fourth book. But the third volume is a quick read, and I will make myself read it first, and of course I'll enjoy it very much, as well.
One of my biggest memories in reading Tehanu was the sense that the book is written in a very different voice than the original trilogy -- a "story," as opposed to a "tale," you might say, marked primarily by the difference between a voice narrating in everyday english (if you can call Le Guin's graceful prose "everyday") and a voice telling a tale from long long ago in a more formal and stilted language. I was relieved, a couple of pages in, to be reading Le Guin in the style I've grown to love. Tehanu may well be my favorite Earthsea book not simply because of the wonderful story she weaves, but because her prose brought the characters of Tenar and Ged closer to me than the tale-telling of the original trilogy could do.
Plus, I've always been fascinated by those opportunities to look at someone who's been on a bit of a pedastal with a new eye: to know that a wealthy celebrity likes to eat Cheerios in bed while watching Bugs Bunny; to know that a world leader has a fondness for collecting sea shells while walking barefoot at the shore; to know that the famous share with us the common experiences of life, even while dealing with the bigger issues of the world. Jumping from the formality of the stories in the original trilogy, to the intimate understanding of the people, ordinary in their own ways, which is relayed in Tehanu -- that captured my heart and my mind both times I read the book before. To know Tenar and Ged as ordinary villagers, however powerful they might be in other ways, made them "bigger" in my eyes. <i></i>
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