The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I discovered that they’d published a complete, illustrated version of the Earthsea cycle a couple weeks ago. I’m not overly fond of omnibus editions, but this is illustrated by Charles Vess, and I love his artwork, so I thought that this might be a good time to re-read these books. Because of course I’ve read these books before. I read the first one (in translation) when I was about 10-11 years old, and it had the cover above. I had that book, so I read it several times, but the other two of the first trilogy I borrowed from the library, so I probably just read them once? (Man, that’s a weird cover. Le Guin complains about horrible covers, but she doesn’t mention this one.) This book is massive. It’s just almost 1K pages, but they’re big pages. Looking at the original editions, it looks like the six books altogether were 1,400 pages, and this one also includes some other short stories and stuff, so there’s some heft to this book. Vess does illustrations of key scenes, as well a ... Read full article.