Third go. The boat bit is shorter than I thought.

Third, first since 2014. I'd remembered this as a long book. It isn't. It is very compressed, and almost everything I recall vividly turns out to occupy about a page.

The specific misremembering: I had the pursuit across the open sea as the bulk of the final section. Weeks of it, weather, hunger. It's a handful of pages, and then he turns round and chases the thing instead. The turn is the whole event and I had flattened it into a journey.

Ged is a good deal less likeable than I had been carrying around. He is proud and cold and he gets a man killed through vanity in the first quarter, and Le Guin never softens it. Vetch is the sole warm thing in the book and he is barely in it.

What changed in me: I used to read this as a story about a boy earning power. Now it reads as a story about a boy learning that most of what he can do, he shouldn't. Not an interpretation I am proud of taking three goes to arrive at, but there it is.

Nine. There is a stretch on Osskil I would trim. And the prose does that faintly biblical thing that I love in her and that I know puts other people off entirely; my brother got forty pages in and gave up on the grounds that it sounded, in his words, like church.