Great writing on a great writer!! LeGuin has been a "north star" for me for most of my life. As great a critic as she was a writer, I discovered most of my favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy from LeGuin cosigns-- Samuel Delany, Mercedes Lackey, Robert Holdstock, Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe chief among them. When I first read Earthsea in sixth grade, I was enamored by the sense of melancholy that permeated the world. Upon return, I find all of them to be profoundly sad and beautifully written. Something I really love about her work, both Earthsea and Catwings, is her trust in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of young people. So much YA is literally unreadable on a sentence level, with writers and publishers alike cynically reasoning that children don't know any better, but LeGuin (and Brian Jacques and a few others) were able to write beautiful sentences for children.
Great writing on a great writer!! LeGuin has been a "north star" for me for most of my life. As great a critic as she was a writer, I discovered most of my favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy from LeGuin cosigns-- Samuel Delany, Mercedes Lackey, Robert Holdstock, Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe chief among them. When I first read Earthsea in sixth grade, I was enamored by the sense of melancholy that permeated the world. Upon return, I find all of them to be profoundly sad and beautifully written. Something I really love about her work, both Earthsea and Catwings, is her trust in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of young people. So much YA is literally unreadable on a sentence level, with writers and publishers alike cynically reasoning that children don't know any better, but LeGuin (and Brian Jacques and a few others) were able to write beautiful sentences for children.