10 Reasons Why Le Guin's Earthsea Books Can Still Change Your
Life    Le Guin's Earthsea books consist of a trilogy, published
between 1968 and 1972, and then two other novels, from 1990 and
2001, plus a short story collection. You can read just the
original trilogy, and get a rich, bracing saga — but if you
choose to read the two later books, you'll find Le Guin turning
a lot of the themes of the original trilogy on their heads. So
here's why these books, even in the midst of so much fantasy
bounty nowadays, are still essential and amazing:  1) They offer
three very different takes on the heroic journey  We live in a
time when the "Hero's Journey" rules popular culture, in the
wake of Star Wars. But years before George Lucas decided to
distill Joseph Campbell into a simple space Western, Le Guin had
already come up with two versions of the "rise to heroism"
story, which turn a lot of your expectations on their heads.
First the wizard Ged becomes a hero mainly by facing his own
darkness and fixing his own awf