This science fiction classic is beautifully written and beautifully constructed. It's world-driven and character-driven, so the experience of the book builds up over time as you get to know both. It took me a little while to feel at home in the narrative as it switched from the visiting Terran's report to the native Gethenian's diary, but once I got my bearings I enjoyed it a great deal, especially the bright, hard-edged folk tales that are larded throughout.

The Terran narrator's gender essentialism -- his need to define himself by traditional masculinity, his rather stereotyped descriptions of Terran women -- was jarring to me, especially in the context of a far future narrative. However, the book is forty years old, and in Le Guin's words "the rather naive male narrator is a deliberate authorial outreach to male readers" [interview with Guernica magazine]. Perhaps I took him too literally.

The Gethenian cultures are fascinating, not only for the androgyny of the people, but the societal results of living in such a bleak environment, with so few animals and so many hardships. The world has been carefully thought out, and the results are fascinating.

The book is moving and thought-provoking, and succeeds in creating a powerful sense of place and landscape. Not only do I guess that the spaces visited in the book will linger in my mind, but I find that many of the cover illustrations I've seen look familiar -- the artist and I have both been to Karhide. ( )

This is one of the few books I feel comfortable placing among my "favorite books" - at this point I have read it several times, and it has not lost any of the depth of the first reading. I find something new in it each time I come back to it.

It is rare to find a novel that is both a well-crafted story and a well-crafted piece of science fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness is both. The society, culture, and physiology of the Gethenians is well-planned, and the detail that comes from that kind of planning is what brings them to life on the page. The story itself is also well-crafted in the English-class sense of the word - there is a depth to it, pieces you have to put together yourself, several ways to read things, and yet it all comes together in the end.

The larger social implications of the story are also interesting to ponder. Not just the concept of a society without gender - as fascinating and meaningful as that is - but also the meaning of friendship, the meaning of trust, the importance of the journey vs. the importance of the end, and of course "the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." ( )

I bought the special 25th anniversary edition when it first came out in 1994 fully intending to read it then. But that was the year of the big “upheaval” when after living 25 years in Savannah hubby was transferred to California. Somehow I never got around to reading it until I saw so many people on LT talking about it the last few months so I searched among the mess that my library has become recently and finally tackled it.

I had a difficult time getting into the story so I had a slow beginning. I’m not sure why, but I just couldn’t seem to get into a flow with the story. Like Genly Ai I found the inhabitants of Winter to be difficult to understand and the strange words from that world really slowed me down. I did enjoy the interspersed chapters that gave myths and history of this strange world and Genly Ai’s visit to the foretellers I found interesting. About 2/3 of the way through, after reading it for nearly a week, I finally put the book aside in order to finish reading Battle Cry of Freedom and a couple of lighter reads for relaxation.

Last Sunday I finally decided I wanted to finish it so I could move on. The last third went very quickly for me and I finished it in an afternoon (those of you who know me realize that is fast reading for me!). Suddenly I seemed to connect with the two main characters and I really enjoyed the rest of the book. I’m not sure if this part of the book was just more interesting or if my attitude had changed allowing me to appreciate the story. Perhaps, because I gave the story “a rest,” subconsciously I processed what I had read previously and the world didn’t seem as strange to me any more. In the end, it was a satisfying read. Recommended ( )

I would happily have read a collection of the Gethenian folk tales which Le Guin sprinkles through The Left Hand of Darkness, but the book itself left me rather underwhelmed. Perhaps it was simply that I was expecting too much from a book that has been hailed as a classic for the last 40 years, but I was never engaged by either the characters or the story line. I was also very frustrated by the way the novel dealt with gender: I don't think that Le Guin succeeded in balancing the (rather essentialist sexist) viewpoint of the main narrator, Genly Ai, with what she was trying to say about what is considered 'male' and 'female' behaviour.

The use of the 'he' pronoun for people who are asexual for most of their lives is too much of a framing device, and though we are told that the Gethenian characters are 'female' as well as 'male', we don't get to see that. The Left Hand of Darkness seems to posit that gender=sexuality (and oh boy, is there ever a host of Freudian thinking in here about how bisexuality and/or a lack of sexual drive creates passivity and a lack of conflict), and that the Gethenians don't have 'gender'—when of course they do, just not as we know it. My eyebrows also rose at Ai's assertion that gender is always and irrefutably the single biggest constraint and formative influence on a person—never trumped by race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, physical disabilities, apparently—and at how heteronormative it was. So written by a second-wave feminist. For 1969, I'm sure it was ground-breaking. In 2009, however, it reads as dated, simplistic, and occasionally infuriating. ( )

This book is sci-fi the way I like it. Sure there are aliens, but we aren't at war with them. This is a quintessential novel about a strange alien and what their strangeness tells us about ourselves. ( )