I've been a huge fan of Le Guin's science fiction for about 20 years, but I didn't start reading the Earthsea books until a few years ago. I recently moved these two later books in the series --Tehanu and Tales From Earthsea--to the top of my list to prepare for an online discussion of the Earthsea books (info here).
Tehanu
There's more going on in Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea book, than I can really get to in this review (as with most Le Guin novels), but I can say it really helped to read Le Guin's 2012 afterword in my edition.
I generally like science fiction better than fantasy because fantasy is often more limited by its genre conventions. Tolkien did it a lot better than his many imitators. Fantasy doesn't have to be this way, though, as Le Guin and a few others, most recently and especially N. K. Jemisin, show us. It doesn't have to be about young boys (or young Hobbits) going on quests, or even if it is, as in A Wizard of Earthsea, it doesn't have to take place in a Manichean moral universe with Medieval European roots.
Tehanu upends the genre again by focusing on a middle-aged woman living a normal (mostly non-magical) life. Decades after the events of The Tomb of Atuan, Tenar finds herself widowed after choosing a quiet farm life of marriage and children. Her children are grown but she has adopted a girl she calls Therru, who was burned by her cruel father. Tenar receives word that Ogion (Ged's mentor from the earlier books) is dying and wishes to see her. She journeys to visit, and he soon dies. Ged arrives on the back of a dragon fresh from the events of The Farthest Shore, injured and having lost his magical power. She takes care of him until he's healthy. Eventually some baddies come for Tenar, Ged, and Therru. And I'll leave it there except to note that there's also plenty of farming and chores.
As always, Le Guin's prose is beautiful. As I noted in my review of The Tombs of Atuan, the prose of her fantasy is a bit more mythic. You get some of that here, but this is also a more down-to-Earth(sea) book.
Following the through line of the Daoist elements of this series, it's worth noting that Tenar has turned her back on a life of royal privilege to lead a quiet life with its own quiet joys and annoyances, which reminds me of Zhuangzi's response when offered a powerful government job (he tells the story of a fancy turtle skeleton on display in a royal hall and asks if it'd rather be dragging its tail in the mud. He tells the messenger that he, Zhuangzi, would rather drag his tail in the mud than accept this job!).
Ged is also coming to terms with losing his more active magical and political power, learning to be with the land and people around him instead of exercising power over the world and people in it. As Le Guin notes in her Afterword, Ged needs a different kind of learning, one that Tenar figured out long before him. And the meditations on different kinds of power also may portend bigger changes in Earthsea.
The gender issues are one of the things people talk a lot about in this book, and for good reason. Like The Tombs of Atuan, this is from a woman's perspective (the same woman, in fact, but not quite the "same"). It is easy to think Le Guin is going for some sort of statement about difference feminism (basically that women and men are different, whether essentially or culturally, and these differences should be respected). But as always with Le Guin, the situation is more complicated than it appears. In her Afterword, she notes that the witch Moss has outright contempt for men, but Tenar is more equivocal.
Tenar herself has a lot of thoughts about the strange ways of men, and maybe there is some sort of difference feminism in Le Guin's explorations of the powers of women in Earthsea. But given the fact that women are denied entry to the wizard school for patriarchal, misogynist reasons rather than anything to do with essential differences, Le Guin is not making any sort of gender essentialist point.
Of course, she would likely deny that a novel by itself makes any points. At best, it makes suggestions and asks questions, or allows us to look at things from different perspectives, freeing us from the stuffy cupboards of our own points of view. And nobody does that better than Le Guin.
See also my Goodreads review.
Tales from Earthsea
I don't quite have a full review in me for Tales from Earthsea, but I'll just say that fans of Earthsea will appreciate the story of the founding of the wizard school ("The Finder"), the nice visits to Earthsea ("Darkrose and Diamond", "The Bones of the Earth", and "On the High Marsh"), and a continuation of the story in Tehanu ("Dragonfly") that's supposed to be a bridge between that novel and the next one in the series (I just read Tehanu, so I especially loved this one).
Fantasy nerds will love the anthropological and historical "A Description of Earthsea" (think: Tolkien's Appendices to the the Lord of the Rings). I love that stuff. And it really gives a deeper understanding of Earthsea that will help when I get to the last book and then read all of them again.
See also my Goodreads review.
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