I have set out on a quest! Namely, to read at least one book in every major and quality epic fantasy series. Ursula Le Guin's old classic A Wizard of Earthsea, being by far the thinnest of the books I could find in traditional bookstores, is the first I have tackled. At under two hundred pages, it's a pretty quick read, especially in a genre in which six hundred page books are perhaps the norm, and thousand page books aren't out of the question.

A Wizard of Earthsea is actually very much not what I was expecting, or in a sense, even looking for. Le Guin's style is entirely unique among the other authors in the genre that I've read. She extremely short on dialog, detail, description, and, well, basically everything. That would probably explain the thinness of the book. The only thing she's long on, really, is names. You may know next to nothing about Felkway or Ilien, but you'll hear their names if Ged sails by them.

Her style reminds, more than anything, or Arthurian legend, or perhaps myth and parable. There's a certain amount of wonder to her understated depictions of Earthsea that points back to childhood, somehow. The story is more a chronicle of events than anything.

Despite the lack of description of the world of Earthsea, it was actually relatively vivid in my mind as I read. Relative to other series, it was perhaps not so much, but Le Guin offers just enough detail that your imagination can fill in the rest. I would guess that my vision of Earthsea would be quite different than yours; whether this is a good or bad thing - or neither - I'm not sure.

The one place where I feel the book does suffer from lack of description is in the characters. Ged - the main character - always felt distant and hollow to me. There are other series that I read entirely for the characters, purely because I've grown so attached to them. I felt no attachment whatsoever to Ged or anyone else in the book. If he would have died, I would have said, "oh. Huh." and then carried on. Don't expect this one to tug at your emotions.

A Wizard of Earthsea was published in 1968, also notable as the year that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I mention this because the population of Earthsea is pointedly and overwhelmingly not-white. This apparently made it one-of-a-kind in '68, and to my knowledge, not much has changed in that regard. Fantasy heroes and their worlds were white white white back then, and while I've read some books that include other skin tones, the main characters - and typically the bulk of the worlds' populations - are white.

A Wizard of Earthsea is a fine book, I imagine, and I found it a unique and interesting read. That said, I have no real interest in reading any more books in the series. It wasn't bad enough to push me away, but it wasn't good enough to pull me in, either.