#i’m stoned and unemployed and procrastinating more important stuff

[subject-beam]

Would you recommend watching Earthsea, reading the books or both?

DO NOT WATCH EITHER ADAPTATION OF EARTHSEA (american miniseries and ghibli movie). I cannot stress enough that they are both supremely terrible adaptations of the books, as well as being arguably quite bad as standalone pieces of media. I believe there are some well-liked radio drama adaptations available on Youtube though!

But really, I can’t recommend the books enough. A Wizard of Earthsea is widely beloved for a reason, but imo the rest of the series as a whole far surpasses it. There are good audiobook readings as well, though I’ve found that they can be hard to follow in that format. They’re short but dense so they move at a quick pace and it’s easy to miss significant details and implications.

The first trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore) is very episodic. Each concerns the coming-of-age of a different adolescent protagonist, so you could really read them in any order; chronological is probably the most rewarding, since the protagonist of Wizard is a major character for the whole series, but if you’d prefer to read a book with a female protagonist and/or have a penchant for slow-burn psychological drama, I’d start with Atuan. It’s my favorite book of the first trilogy (and also the shortest!)

The second trilogy (Tehanu, Tales From Earthsea, and The Other Wind) takes a sharp turn into darker, more mature subject matter. It’s messier than the first but far more complex and thematically rich. Sex becomes a major theme—not in the GoT “high fantasy that FUCKS” sense but in the sense that it deconstructs the patriarchal and erotophobic social structures that are presented uncritically in the first trilogy, and often taken for granted as the foundations of high fantasy worldbuilding. These you need to read in chronological order, as they’re far more dependent on your knowledge of the previous books, though a friend of mine has confirmed that Tehanu (my favorite book of the series and one of my favorite books, period) is still powerful as a stand-alone novel.

The illustrated “Books of Earthsea” omnibus also includes the four short stories in the series, two of which she wrote before Wizard (“The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names”) and two which she wrote after The Other Wind (“The Daughter of Odrin” and “Firelight”), as well as the essay “Earthsea Revisioned.” I highly recommend reading “Revisioned” after Tehanu, as that’s when it was written and that’s the book it chiefly concerns. I read the short stories in chronological order after finishing the novels, which offered a nice retrospective microcosm of the development of the whole series. Whatever you do, save “Firelight” for last.