The Earthsea cycle is very, very different from Tolkien and GRRM. The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole a

The Earthsea cycle is very, very different from Tolkien and GRRM. The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole and individually. The point of view character in each novel is a young person, passing through late adolescence and into adulthood. In this respect it is more comparable to Harry Potter or The Dark Is Rising or perhaps His Dark Materials fantasy series. The world LeGuin builds for the story is incredibly rich and unique, like Middle Earth and the world of ASOIAF, but the structure of the stories are considerably simpler. However, the "inner life" of the stories are richer. Like the Dune series, the novels of Earthsea spend a lot of time deep in the perspective of a few key characters. I think it is one reason these novels are so hard to film in a satisfying way. That said, where Earthsea really distinguishes itself from almost any other fantasy series, is the fact that LeGuin came back to the series much later in her life and added two more books. These are set in the same world but regard it with different perspectives of age and gender. The original trilogy is classic fantasy about Our Heroes who are uniquely gifted and ultimately save the day and pass into legend. The final two books are about what happens to those people when they face the complicated and unsatisfying future: their personal gifts are no longer powerful, and their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by a new generation... and ultimately found to be not only flawed, but awful. Some of the things they defended were not absolutely good after all, but the lasting artifacts of earlier selfishness, bias, and bigotry. I resisted reading these later two novels for a long time because I enjoyed the purity of the stories in the original trilogy. But now having read them all, I find I can enjoy them in related but still somewhat separate ways. If the later two novels don't sound like your kind of thing, you could read the first three now, and then visit the last two books a decade or two (or three) later. That would align your perspective with LeGuin's when she wrote them.