The first book to be looked at by Park Lane Book Club. According to Wikipedia ‘In 1987, Locus ranked A Wizard of Earthsea number three among the 33 “All-Time Best Fantasy Novels”‘. The novel has won several awards including a Lewis Carrol Shelf Award.
I had heard a great deal about Ursula Le Guin both for her fiction, and the philosophy and political thought she expressed in it, but I had not read her work and I am not very familiar with either fantasy or science fiction, the two genres that best describe most of her writing.
I chose this novel, thinking it might be a good level for years five and six, and possibly even the better readers of year four. It was late in the term and setting up the library blog and the busy last few weeks of term meant that I was a little too late to get any of our students on board with the book club. This first will be a road test, then, with two passionate readers whose knowledge of fantasy will undoubtedly put mine to shame. Still, with Clara and Annegret both being German and reading the book in English, and with myself being English and reading it in Czech from the 3rd or 4th chapter when I got my hands on the Czech translation from the library, this remains an international book club in some ways at least.
I hope over the next couple of weeks that we might throw back and forth a few ideas about the book and work out a kind of shape for the book club that both those at Park Lane and outside of it can use and abuse in future virtual get-togethers.
I’ll be writing a few of my thoughts here, but this is not about me and what I think. I will not be coming here or suggesting books to be discussed to tell children or others how to read them or what meaning to take from them. Nor will I be leading the discussions. In fact, for that reason it is great that the first book we will be discussing is in a genre I am not familiar with and have tended to resist reading. I would like everybody to be able to throw around ideas, questions and interpretations, and I am looking forward to learning from Anne and Clara this time, and from, I hope, more people and some of Park Lane’s own children in future discussions.
But it’s time for me to go to work so I’ll leave it there for the moment and check back in later to see where the book, its hero Ged, and its author Le Guin, will take us.
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I originally posted the above on LibraryThing.com hoping to have something called a forum, an on-line system for allowing people to have these kind of conversations, often sorted into different ‘threads’. For us these threads might be ‘plot’, ‘language’ and ‘characters’, for example. Unfortunately, LibraryThing only allows children over 13 to join. I should have thought of this, but I didn’t, so we are back here for now. Later (perhaps much later), I may be able to change this website, hosting it, meaning storing it, on the computers and the internet ‘server’ at work, instead of at the computers at WordPress. By doing this, I should be able to set up a Park Lane forum that is on the internet and visible to all, but safe.
The book pusher of Lesser Town 