4.5—I started (and quickly put down, but not for reasons of badness) the short story Brothers and Sisters by LeGuin the other day: we walk alongside a man leaving the hospital where his brother is in care following a quarry accident as he gets lunch, jokes with his brother's coworkers, and walks a long distance looking at the mountains before—alone—finally collapsing to cry about his brother. This is all contained in one very long paragraph; much is skipped and other things are overexplained, but what matters to the character in memory and experience is plainly rendered. It's a style I admire. It's a relatively mundane story published eight years after this book (1976), and you see the beginnings of that reserved style developing in Earthsea.

Under modern conventions this may be considered a 'summary' book; there is much telling, but it is also refreshing simply to "get there." I don't know enough about classic fantasy to guess if this book's brevity is a direct response to, for example, Tolkien's sprawling prose, but it is what I'd like to guess. There's a little snippet at the end of this book, in my copy the final verso page just before the cover, suggesting that the histories of the story we've just read are so varied as to obscure these events; the implication I took from it is that we were told the story as Ged would have remembered it after much time passed. What elements mattered. The friendships he forged, the arduous journeys, the way people lived. Though a 55-year-old book can't reasonably guide a modern work of fantasy with what its readers expect from it, it unexpectedly taught me a lot about narrative and what is strictly required to tell a story with gravitas.

Because it hit me. I didn't think I'd cry over this book, but I did! We didn't spend a ton of time on character or in character-informed conversation, but what time we did spend was enough to stick the landing. I guessed the "twist" (if we can call it that) less than halfway through the book, but it was every bit the enjoyable ride on our way to get there, and nothing of that accurate guessing diluted the impact of the story. There are elements of this book that I would consider plot holes today, and none of this matters. Narrative and style were enough to develop pathos in a book that created depth only selectively.

LeGuin asked: What is actually required to tell this story resonantly? And then she did it. Great stuff. I will certainly read this again, and hope to work through the series this year.