• The My Reading series offers personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors and works, and to show their effect upon a reader's own thinking and development
• A book about the joys of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, the original young adult fantasy series that has been popular for the past five decades
• Explains what readers in the modern era have sought in turning to fantasy and why Le Guin has been such an inspiration for later writers such as Neil Gaiman and N. K. Jemisin
• Shows how Le Guin's work explores trans lives and feminism, making her a revolutionary fantasy and science fiction writer
• The author reflects on how Le Guin has helped him to make sense of his own adulthood and his childhood escapism, and to understand things that went wrong in his own life by reference to how Le Guin sees the world

A book on the experience of reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels.

What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. She owned John Plotz at age eight, on the overlit and understaffed second floor of the DC library. Four decades and who knows how many re-readings later, her Earthsea owns him still.

The reasons to love her Earthsea are many. Le Guin sets readers adrift among worlds: peripatetic but somehow at home. She sublimely mixes comfort and revelatory, emancipatory unsettlement. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea aims to do justice to both Le Guin's passionate simplicity and her revenant complexity. Small wonder the inspiration she has been for later speculative writers like Neil Gaiman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and N. K. Jemisin.

The boldness and coldness of the later three books of Earthsea is a revelation. In Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, she turned a cold eye, a dragon's searching eye, back on the comfortable green world she herself had made decades earlier. They unfold a distinctive vision of the writer's task: worldbuilding as responsibility plus openness. Call it invitational realism. She builds a world that leaves the real task of building, of creating of imagining and of reimagining, with her readers.

Drawing on his own crooked path—from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood—Plotz maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar's stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation.