Swimming in Earthsea
I'm still escaping my life through fantasy books. On Saturday, I finished The Amber Spyglass and still didn't want to talk to anyone. Nothing on my bookshelves called to me. Instead, I went to Powell's on Hawthorne.
I love bookstores where you don't have to talk to anyone and you can stand/sit there and just read. The fourth book of the His Dark Materials series, Lyra's Oxford, is really a short story. I read it at the store rather than buying it.
Then I bought the first four books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series.
I haven't fully submerged into them yet. I'm about halfway through A Wizard of Earthsea, but I spent some of the weekend re-watching old movies. The novel is full of odd, made-up names typical of Le Guin's sci-fi novels. Some of them are so strange, I choose to shorten them to the first letter. One of the characters, a mage at the wizarding school, is simply "K" to me. I couldn't tell you what his actual name is. It makes me glad that the main character has such a short name, Ged. I have no idea how it is "supposed to be" pronounced. For me, it rhymes with Ked (like the shoes--keds) and has a hard /g/.
I'm very bad with guessing pronunciations for words or names I don't know. I'm not alone in this. My family has a collection of words that one or the other of us kids learned by reading and then tried out in conversation. My two best known words of this type were vehement and epitome. I still have to think about vehement. My instincts tell me it should be vee-HEM-ent.
Epitome comes easy to me now, although my mother got a big kick out of EP-i-tome ("tome" like a book and rhymes with Rome) when I was about 10 or 11. It was used in the blurb on the back of my book, and I knew its meaning as I had seen it before. Standing in the front hallway in the light from the open front door, I read the blurb to my mother who was in the kitchen. It must have been a Saturday in springtime by the color of the light from outside. I was a wee bit embarrassed by my mispronunciation and by the hoots of laughter erupting from my mother. Looking back on it, though, I feel a warmth from the shared moment with my mother--she was delighted by me. This was just before the darker years ahead, a last moment of joy, and it was just the two of us.
I love bookstores where you don't have to talk to anyone and you can stand/sit there and just read. The fourth book of the His Dark Materials series, Lyra's Oxford, is really a short story. I read it at the store rather than buying it.
Then I bought the first four books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series.
I haven't fully submerged into them yet. I'm about halfway through A Wizard of Earthsea, but I spent some of the weekend re-watching old movies. The novel is full of odd, made-up names typical of Le Guin's sci-fi novels. Some of them are so strange, I choose to shorten them to the first letter. One of the characters, a mage at the wizarding school, is simply "K" to me. I couldn't tell you what his actual name is. It makes me glad that the main character has such a short name, Ged. I have no idea how it is "supposed to be" pronounced. For me, it rhymes with Ked (like the shoes--keds) and has a hard /g/.
I'm very bad with guessing pronunciations for words or names I don't know. I'm not alone in this. My family has a collection of words that one or the other of us kids learned by reading and then tried out in conversation. My two best known words of this type were vehement and epitome. I still have to think about vehement. My instincts tell me it should be vee-HEM-ent.
Epitome comes easy to me now, although my mother got a big kick out of EP-i-tome ("tome" like a book and rhymes with Rome) when I was about 10 or 11. It was used in the blurb on the back of my book, and I knew its meaning as I had seen it before. Standing in the front hallway in the light from the open front door, I read the blurb to my mother who was in the kitchen. It must have been a Saturday in springtime by the color of the light from outside. I was a wee bit embarrassed by my mispronunciation and by the hoots of laughter erupting from my mother. Looking back on it, though, I feel a warmth from the shared moment with my mother--she was delighted by me. This was just before the darker years ahead, a last moment of joy, and it was just the two of us.
posted by Lizard Foot at
4:24 PM
1 Comments:
Have you read the Earthsea books before? I have, a few years ago, but I don't remember if I read all of them or only the first one or two.
Today Wm said the dog had trouble with spatial issues, and he said "spat-chul." Kind of like "spatula," without the "a." I didn't correct him, though I might mention it later.
I'm only 200 pages into The Amber Spyglass--you blew right past me!
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