The Left Hand of Darkness

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Love Le Guin's idea of humankind, of empathy, intimacy, curiosity - "the other worlds among the stars--the other kinds of men, the other lives."

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A beautiful example of the flexibility of Le Guin’s writing with parts of it being official reports, parts of it a record of a people’s myths, and parts excerpts from a person’s diary. She accomplishes the study of gender that Heinlein so clumsily failed at in I Will Fear No Evil. And she does it so well. How does a man live among and relate to a people who have no true gender? Le Guin proceeds to answer this and she also, in a way no one has ever done before, shows me the true bias and danger of using the male pronoun as the gender neutral pronoun – the way Gentry Ai so effectively silences the feminine. It’s stunning, brutal and bittersweet. A friend of mine says it belongs in the best 50 books ever written in the English language. I’m inclined to agree.