6 ms·
I wanted to like "The Left Hand of Darkness" but found that Le Guin didn't make that much of a great premise and the storytelling seemed a little weak. I don't
by zwieback 8y ago
I wanted to like "The Left Hand of Darkness" but found that Le Guin didn't make that much of a great premise and the storytelling seemed a little weak. I don't think this is her best work by far.
Reading this review I realize maybe I didn't read it closely enough or maybe I'm not invested enough in the topic.
- msbarnett 8y agoOut of curiosity, which would you say is her best work? (Left Hand isn't my favorite, either. I'd probably give that to The Dispossessed).
- moultano 8y agoI'd second The Dispossessed.
- ngvrnd 8y agoI liked "Always Coming Home". And "The Lathe of Heaven" made a big impression when I was a kid.
- berbec 8y agoTehanu is my favorite.
- jhbadger 8y agoI really think "A Wizard of Earthsea” is underrated. It really was one of the first examples of fantasy that was set in a society not based on Western ones.
- r00fus 8y agoThe Lathe of Heaven [1]. My best example of a book written by one author in the /style/ of another author (in this case, her friend Philip K Dick). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven
- tildedave 8y agoMy personal favorite is _The Tombs of Atuan_ - it introduces a new character, creates an entire world around her, then pulls all the assumptions beneath the world apart.
- tanbog 8y agoI second this. I think it was my first encounter with a genre book that totally "subverted" everything I had learned fantasy narratives should be.
- zwieback 8y agoI also think the Dispossessed.
- domdib 8y agoThrough childhood association, my favourite is the first three Earthsea books, but probably her greatest writing is in her post-apocalyptic semi-utopia Always Coming Home, and maybe her most moving writing is in the 'story suite' Five Ways to Forgiveness (originally Four Ways...) on societies dealing with racism and slavery. Needless to say, her short stories are marvellous too.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoI thought "The Left Hand of Darkness" was great. It had a sense of realism and presence that I normally find most fiction lacking.
- billjings 8y agoThe Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are my two favorite works of hers, and I've read both a few times over the years. But that's not what I used to say. I used to say that The Dispossessed was my favorite, and that the Left Hand of Darkness is overrated. My opinion has flipped over the years. I now give Left Hand the edge, and I think that it's because the books are about such different topics. The Dispossessed is all about matters I was concerned with when I was a younger man: the relationship of one's work with the world, and the ethics of the larger systems we operate in. It's a lot like other sci-fi books: a treatment of an idea, where the characterization (although strong for the genre) is secondary. But The Left Hand of Darkness is, at its heart, about the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven. The core sequence of the novel, the trek across the ice sheet, is beautiful and memorable as a depiction of a setting, but also as an exploration of human intimacy, with the device of Gethenian sexuality used as a kind of scalpel to shed light on how male and female shades our relations. I used to think that the big ideas were what mattered. But the older I get, the more I appreciate that the big ideas are just extensions of what happens between individuals. The Dispossessed uses this technique as well, of course, but the intimacy of Left Hand just hits harder for me these days.
- zwieback 8y ago> I used to think that the big ideas were what mattered. But the older I get, the more I appreciate that the big ideas are just extensions of what happens between individuals. Very well put.
- pmoriarty 8y agoI'm huge fan of Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, which I've read and re-read many times, but when I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness I couldn't get in to it because I found it really boring.