Reviews and Comments

Recommended by a friend.

Reading this is too much like work… 😅

I had wanted to read some of the Murderbot Diaries series for a long time, but the upcoming TV show (and discussions about the casting) made me want to read it for myself. The setting and themes to me feel very camp, and I think it might be the first camp sci-fi I've knowingly read. It also feels queer-coded.

I'm a bit confused, just like Murderbot: I can't quite separate whether it's more camp or queer-coded.

In any case I really enjoyed it and hope to read subsequent books.

Reading mostly so I can be an Earthsea completionist... I am sure I have read some of the non-Earthsea short stories before.

For me this is the most interesting of the Earthsea books so far. There’s a deep exploration of the roles of both women and men; it’s sometimes frustrating to read, and maybe if it were written today some things would be expressed differently, but I think it’s pretty much perfect as it is. I very much enjoyed it; it felt like a reward for patiently reading the earlier books with more traditional gender roles.

Le Guin writes beautiful descriptive prose, of both people and places. The oft-quoted speeches (e.g. from Moss) in this book were not so memorable in isolation for me as for some other readers; rather, it is the totality of the book that I loved.

Feel like I skimmed this more than the first two Earthsea books, but it was still very good.

I got about a third of the way through this. It's a great concept but doesn't work for me in this format.

It's a collection of (highly) abridged speeches with an (admitted, but still present) US and anglosphere bias. It was an impulse pick-up from the library's rainbow shelf – the cover is very nice. But it didn't hold my attention (each speech being edited down to one page) and wasn't sufficiently interesting to revisit regularly enough before the library demanded it back...

I did really enjoy reading this, and will almost certainly go on to read the other Earthsea books.

I came to Earthsea after reading several of Le Guin's Hainish cycle books and short stories, including some of the earliest ones like Rocannon's World. I can see similarities with the earliest Hainish cycle works, from around the same time - an emphasis on male characters, for example - which I am sure would have been handled differently by the same author had she written them later on. But there are still a lot of great ideas here, and it is far more open-minded than most fantasy literature of its era.

My first time reading the Earthsea books, after enjoying lots of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish works, and other short stories.

Going to try to finish this time!

Not an easy read at all, but I'm glad I read it. Another book that I wish I had known about and read a long time ago.

First novel I have read in a while, mostly because I borrowed this on my e-reader to read next to a sleeping kid.

I wish it was easier to borrow good ebooks or buy DRM-free copies. I’d do this much more often.

Also a bit melancholy that I only discovered Ursula K Le Guin’s works in my thirties; I like to think they’d have meant a lot to me if I had read them as a teenager.

I got this from the library (after a long wait) and managed to read Part 1 before returning it today. Definitely a thought provoking read, I hope to borrow it again to read Part 2.

Finally finished with this book in time to return it to the library before going on summer vacation. I found it moving, and some of the stories were sad or difficult to read - but also, it's a book full of reasons for optimism. It was telling to see common themes emerge in people's stories; I learned a lot about the different intersecting cultures, traditions and power structures one finds amongst Sámi peoples, and also in Sápmi (definitely not always the same thing). Taken as a whole, many of the people interviewed really are queering Sápmi - questioning existing structures and norms. It would be interesting to know how much has changed or improved since this book came out over a decade ago.