I first read A Wizard of Earthsea when I was twelve, and it shaped my idea of what fantasy could be. Rereading it now, I’m struck by how different it feels from most fantasy—quieter, more interested in interiority than in spectacle.

The magic system is famously based on true names. To know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. But what Ged learns, eventually, is that the most important true name to know is your own.

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

There’s a thread running through all the Earthsea books about balance—not good versus evil, but the equilibrium of the world. Magic isn’t free; every act of power has consequences that ripple outward.

What I noticed this time

The pacing. Modern fantasy moves fast, but Le Guin takes her time. There are long passages where nothing happens except thinking and sailing. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Also: the later books (Tehanu, The Other Wind) are better than I remembered. They’re doing something different—more concerned with age, and gender, and the cost of heroism. Less adventure, more reckoning.

I think I needed to be older to appreciate them.