Earthsea

There is a lesson every wizard of Earthsea learns young: to know a thing's true name is to hold its whole being, and to speak it is to move the balance of the world. This is an archipelago of hundreds of islands scattered across an uncharted sea, where magic is not spectacle but craft and consequence—a discipline of restraint, in which the wise study when not to work their art as closely as how. It is a world weathered by wind and salt, small in its doings and vast in what those doings mean. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote Earthsea across four decades as a single cycle. It opens with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), the making of a gifted, headstrong boy on the island of Gont, and runs on through The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore—the original trilogy, told in quick succession. Nearly twenty years later she returned with Tehanu, the stories of Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, works that turn back on the earlier books to ask who, in this world, is permitted power. Read them in the order she published them; it is also the order she reckoned them, each answering the last. Beneath everything runs a Taoist grain—light and dark, doing and being, mortality held against the naming of things. The prose is plain, cool, and deep as seawater: nothing hurried, nothing wasted. Begin with the boy on Gont, and let the wind carry you outward.