One of my earliest reading memories is my mother reading the Earthsea trilogy to my older brothers and me at bedtime. We had the three books in one volume. I reread it when I was in high school a dozen years after that and it was completely falling apart by then.

Some day I'll be completely falling apart too, I suppose, but for now I'm happy to wait to share this with my daughters. It has been hard for them to get past Ged being an orphan though.

Paul Hudak quips that the three most important things in computer science are abstraction, abstraction, abstraction. I like to think A Wizard of Earthsea's emphasis on naming subtly imprinted on me and later helped me study computer science.