Ursula K. Le Guin is brilliant.

From a great article at The Guardian (via Bookslut):

On J. K. Rowling:

"I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did," she says quietly, "though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt."

On the beastly Earthsea mini-series:

"I made a conscious choice to make most of my characters people of colour." In the Earthsea books, Ged is a dark copper-red, and his friend Vetch is black. "I've had endless battles with cover departments. Gradually the people on the books are darkening - it's taken that long." The early Earthsea books were loosely adapted as a TV miniseries for the US sci-fi channel last year, but it was "roundly booed and deserves to die a quiet death", she says. "Everybody was white except for one black man. It was a travesty."

On C. S. Lewis:

But, "raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit", she found much of CS Lewis "simply Christian apologia, full of hatred and contempt for people who didn't agree. The division into good and evil was different from Tolkien, where evil beings are only a metaphor for the evil in our lives; he never casts people into the outer darkness as Lewis enjoyed doing."

I've been meaning to read Gifts ever since it came out.  I'll have to move it up in my TBR pile.  The article also made me want to read her earlier sci-fi.  Anyone read it?  Recommendations?