Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday, at home in Portland. She was eighty-eight. I've been carrying it around for two days, trying to work out what to say, and I keep coming back to a library.

I was eleven. It was summer, and my mother, who had the summer off and firm views about children with nothing to do, left me at the downtown library in Duluth most mornings while she ran errands. It's the long, low building on Superior Street that everyone says looks like an ore boat. The children's librarian there knew my mother, which meant she knew me, which meant there was no hiding in the picture books. One morning she put A Wizard of Earthsea in my hands and said, "This one's about a boy who's too proud," in a tone that made me suspect she and my mother had talked.

I read it on the floor between two shelves. I remember the carpet. I remember the moment the boy everyone calls Sparrowhawk is given his true name by a quiet old mage, and learns he must keep it to himself, and tell it only to someone he'd trust with his life. In Earthsea, to know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. A wizard who knows the true name of the sea can calm it. Anyone who knows yours can do as they like with you.

That summer I decided I must have a true name too, and that nobody had bothered to tell me. I spent weeks on it. I wrote candidates in the back of a spiral notebook and crossed them out. I settled on one in August and never told anyone, and the internet isn't getting it either.

What I took from that book, without knowing I was taking anything, was that a name isn't a label. It's the thing itself, or as close as words get. When I'm stuck on a character now, it's often because I'm calling them something that isn't true. More on that another time.

I read the rest of the Earthsea books over the next few years, as the library had them, and when I was older I read her other novels, and her essays, which are as sharp as anything I know about why people tell stories at all. But it's the first one I go back to. A boy makes a terrible mistake out of pride and spends the whole book running from what he's made, and he only gets free of it when he turns around, walks toward it, and calls it by its name.

On the way home tonight I stopped at the branch library on Capitol Hill. They had a copy, an old hardcover with a crack down the spine, and I sat in a chair by the window and read the first chapter until they started turning the lights down.

Did anyone hand you a book at exactly the right age? Who was it?