June 2025 readings

This is the first entry in what I'm going to try and make a little series of, summarizing the books I've read since the last update, alongside some brief thoughts on each work. These are just those since the beginning of 2025.

The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)

As the name suggests, this is an anthology collection of all the Earthsea novels, namely:

Quite a lot to get through, but it was an absolutely lovely time. I wish I'd cottoned on to Earthsea when I was younger — the first three books especially would have been completely up my alley as a kid, and I kinda wonder if the more sober feminist outlook of the latter three would have set me on a better path in life. Probably not! But a Worm can dream.

Tehanu takes quite a unique approach for fantasy literature in that it isn't even really about magic (though there's some), so much as one woman, a widowed farmer's wife that actively chose that instead of the glory she could have had (who was the protagonist in The Tombs of Atuan), and ex-Archmage Ged's flailing attempts to reckon with permanently losing his magic in the end of The Farthest Shore. The two, naturally, end up in a romantic relationship; this was unfortunate for me, because while I genuinely loved how Tehanu moved the focus to everyday domestic life, I have simply never liked reading about romance — it evokes strange and uncomfortable feelings. Likewise with sex, unless in a very specific mood. But despite that, I did appreciate it's reanalysis of the world Le Guin wrote nearly twenty years before, finally addressing the implicit gendered power imbalance of the older books (women are forbidden from being formally trained in magic, village witches forced to pass on what little knowledge they have from one generation to the next — “weak as woman's magic, wicked as woman's magic” is a cliché phrase in-universe).

Tales from Earthsea is a collection of short stories, written as a way to return to the world after another decade spent away from it. These were pretty fun! And then The Other Wind is a classic send-off: the world is changing, forever; the dragons are leaving; the mistakes of the past, made by wizards who didn't understand what they were meddling with, finally and permanently undone.

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

Abu'l-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (1010), trans. Dick Davis (2006)

This was perhaps a little bit of a slog. Not by any fault of the translator — Davis' choice of translating it as a prosimetrum, a mixture of prose for exposition and rhyming couplets (which the original consisted of entirely, fifty thousand verses' worth) for dialogue and notable scenes, was both a more economical use of his and the reader's time, but also thematically appropriate, translating a work of medieval Persian literature into a common format of medieval literature in the West. At the same time, it remains a very long work (811 pages), produced in an alien cultural context, and by the end I was dying to move on to something a little more digestible.

The sorts of stock phrases used by Ferdowsi (tall as a cyprus tree, pale as a Greek's face, this fleeting world) give a really interesting little window into his world. Other things that stood out to me when reading it were how much emphasis is placed on maces as a weapon of the nobility, more so than swords, especially in earlier stretches of the work.

There's a certain amount of cultural values dissonance a modern reader is likely to experience, when trying to engage with it — repeating patterns of talking about how king Khosrow or Bahram or Yazdegerd or Kavus or what-have-you has seated themselves righteously on the throne; the divine farr (a mystical light of royal justice, no real parallel in European myth) emanates from their face; they dispense gold coins on the poor and the needy, and all is well in the world. And then in no time at all the text moves to discussing how they have become unjust and cruel. Gee, fellas, maybe monarchy has some issues as a form of government, don't you think?

Some notable episodes (do note the romanizations here come from Davis' translation, and might not match those found elsewhere):

Never is it implied that this was even slightly wrong to do.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke (1968)

Although this was released after the (considerably more famous) film of the same name, 2001 was actually written in tandem with it, in direct collaboration with Stanley Kubrick; though some parts were rewritten in response to the film in the time between their publication. I liked it well enough to plan on reading the sequels — nothing super stunningly out-there for a modern reader, a real 60's-ass work of science fiction, but in part that's because it popularized the themes and tropes it contains. A fun read.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)

Not a full book, but a short story — yet I read it as a single eBook, so it goes here all the same. A really poignant work, with some rather vivid and beautiful language (“The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky.”), full of color and imagery. And this only makes the wretchedness and cruelty which follows strike all the harder. I can see why people still talk about it so often.