I’d been quite excited to read this one for a while. It was a Christmas present, and I’d been told that Ursula Le Guin was “the birth of modern fantasy”. Tolkien’s predating her by about a decade aside, it was certainly interesting.
One disclaimer: the edition I read was the original Earthsea quartet of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu. It did not include the two later books written to finish the series.