Tehanu discussion

Golly - you leapt in with the 'difficult' one of the trilogy! (Farthest Shore gave me nightmares, and I'd read the other two beforehand!).
I don't see any reason why you shouldn't read Tehanu, as long as you know that one of the characters was a main character in The Tombs of Atuan.
Tehanu is a much more adult story than the original trilogy, and more focussed on the female characters.

Well, I'd really recommend reading the Tombs of Atuan before this one, as the central character is the one from that book... and I think that's it :)

Anything else that happens in other books, the main character doesn't really know about it - so you can do without them just fine. But Tombs of Atuan is a must, otherwise you might get lost when the main character starts referring to things about in her past.

It was all the stuff about death!

I actually read Tehanu first, although it's officially the fourth book. Tehanu turned out to be my favourite, but personally I wasn't that wild about The Farthest Shore, so I don't know if that would be a factor.

Michaela - I was 13 and just coming to terms with my own mortality! Ursula le Guin's descriptions are very powerful, and don't really connect up with any Christian ideas, what with the low wall the dead climb over and the mountains of pain.
I've re-read it since - the creeping apathy makes me shudder now, rather than the land of the dead. (but no nightmares!)

Tehanu is perhaps a little more pagan.

I loved Tehanu.
Then again, I read the books in the order the author chose.
The only tricky thing about reading the books in their internal order is that Le Guin's publisher chose to publish 'The Other Wind' before 'Tales from Earthsea', even though Tales comes before 'The Other Wind' because it contains the story 'Dragonfly'.