Book 2), The Tombs of Atuan (The Earthsea Cycle

I really enjoyed reading this book. Definitely my favorite book of the series. I'd say that it ranks amongst my favorite fantasy books that I've read. Great pace, thoughts, writing, and character development!

This audio tape has an excellent reader and the words flow beautifully into the mind to create a total otherworld that is enchanting. i listen to this tape to escape the world and to understand it at the same time!

The third book in the Earthsea Cycle follows the wizard Ged and young Prince Arren as they search for the reason behind the forgetting of magic. Magic users across the many islands of Earthsea are forgetting the words of magic and going mad, and it seems to be spreading.

This is a great story of conquering your fears and overcoming what appears to be more than you can handle. It show the value of friendship and commitment. This was a wonderful follow up to the first two books. I have the fourth on my soon to be bought list.

My only complaint is again of the large gap with little to no information of what happens between the stories. I'm the type of reader that enjoys knowing even the more boring parts of the characters lives.

3.5/5

"The Farthest Shore" is another wonderful novel in Le Guin's Earthsea series, following "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Tombs of Atuan." Although the author will revisit some of these characters -- including Sparrowhawk -- in later additions to the series, this book provides a balanced and satisfying ending to the series' opening trilogy. Any of the books can be read as a stand-alone novel, but to me they're better read in order.

I'm not usually a dragon enthusiast, but I must say the dragons here are fascinating characters!

The third Book of Earthsea is well-written, which is something that we come to expect from Ursula Le Guin. It's not my favorite of the series (and the later books were totally unnecessary in my opinion, though I do like The Other Wind). But it is beautiful, and makes its very Taoist points well without beating you over the head with them.

Earthsea: The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. LeGuin, 1972. Another perfectly beautiful fantasy tale. It looks so simple when you examine the style, but every word is poetically chosen to evoke the intended emotions of the reader. Some of the images will stay with me for a long time.
I was struck by the total opposition of the philosophy of this book to another I read recently, The Transhumanist Wager, by Zoltan Istvan. Istvan is seeking immortality through recent scientific breakthroughts. LeGuin puts it plainly in her afterword, “The idea of individual immortality, an endless ego-existence, is more dreadful to me than the idea of letting go the self in death to rejoin shared, eternal being.” Her fantasy writing puts that point of view even more clearly in the reader’s mind.
I read The Farthest Shore as a break from Philip K. Dick’s 900 page Exegesis, but when I returned to that I immediately found this comment by Dick, “... the two modes of interpretation (of his strange experience) which I hover between are S-F and theology, which surely tells us something about S-F we otherwise might not know. The two must be related in some important way.”
Of course, you can’t think of LeGuin without dragons, so here is one of my favorite parts. “It did not move. It might have been crouching there for hours, or for years, or for centuries. It was carven of iron, shaped from rock – but the eyes, the eyes he dared no look into, the eyes like oil coiling on water, like yellow smoke behind glass, the opaque, profound, yellow eyes watched Arren.”

Love Ursula Le Guin and her unusual plotlines and character development. This book is a very slow starter, and seems to take a really long time to introduce the world of the main character. However, it's worth the wait. Don't despair, keep reading!

The brilliant thing about her writing is that she sets up epic high fantasy scenarios that most authors would solve through magic, and then solves them through the relationships the characters have with one another.
I also think that the sort of taken-for-granted chauvinism in the books is actually making a much more subtle feminist point. It takes a remarkably strong write to invite the reader to question the premise of her own world-building.

A travel story with an archmage (chief wizard) and a prince to the end of the known world. The tension is a death eater like desire to live eternally. The resolution is costly and perhaps a little underwhelming. There are dragons . . .