Today, after a peer critique of the fifth or sixth fantasy story we’ve seen this quarter, I asked my fiction writing students how many of them were into fantasy. All but three of them raised their hands.

Then I asked how many of them had read A Wizard of Earthsea. Not one of them had.

Every once in a while, I’ll wonder what I’m doing, what inner problem I’m attempting to solve by working at a community college. Then I’ll have a moment like this, and I’ll realize that if my only contribution to my students’ lives is that I turned a few of them on to Usrula Le Guin–a woman who wrote practically all her books just a couple miles away on Thurman Street in Portland–I will have done something good with my life.

And you, dear reader, do you like fantasy? Have you read A Wizard of Earthsea? If you haven’t, go pick up that little book and check it out: you’ll see something that isn’t a hundredth as famous as Lord of the Rings, and which didn’t make a thousandth as much money for the author as Harry Potter did for J. K. Rowling, but Earthsea is better than both of them. Read it, and then contend with your desire to sue J.K. Rowling for plagiarism.

And as a bonus, if you aspire to be a fantasy or science fiction writer yourself, read just the first paragraph of A Wizard of Earthsea and see how much Le Guin accomplishes without a scintilla of infodump. What’s a dragonlord? you may ask as you read that first paragraph, What’s an archmage? The answer is who knows? It won’t matter, because you’ll already be hooked.