Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the timeless and beloved A Wizard of Earthsea, this complete omnibus edition of the entire Earthsea chronicles includes over fifty illustrations illuminating Le Guin’s vision of her classic saga.
My mind drifts, didn't I own an earlier special edition of one of Le Guin's titles? Wanting to read an excerpt, to get a taste of A Wizard of Earthsea (this links to Indie bookstores), I click on the Amazon link. Look Inside takes me to the author's list of published works, the table of content and a map of an archipelago. I scroll on to the "Introduction". The voice on the page triggers a memory of Le Guin's lecture, years ago at Centrum's Port Townsend Writers Conference. Scanning the first two pages, I'm grabbed by a sentence at the top of the third, "I've written so often of how and why it took me so long to write ..."Intriguing and relatable.
Just a hop and a skip to the fiction book shelves and I spot the box that holds a fat paperback and old-fashioned cassette tape. Will I be able to play that? Do I still own a cassette deck? Until this moment, I have't even bothered to look inside the box. Opening Always Coming Home, Le Guin's 1984 novel, taking in the illustrations, white space, the multitude of approaches between the covers, I feel a tickling sensation in my underbelly, reminiscent of childhood excitement, of my early reader's love for books that took me away from my ordinary, to unknown worlds and places.
What Le Guin writes in the introduction about a certain literary coming of age later in life, speaks to me. I recognize the initial learning from male writers, informed by the Canon of Literature. Not until her sixties Le Guin felt the need "to write of and from my own body, my own gender, in my own voice. I'm tempted to say the latter isn't really true for me, my first published book after all was a memoir. I writing about my parents however, I've neglected my mother's point of view. High time to write of and from her body, our gender, in our voices. And time to look into Always Coming Home.
This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
