The Feminist Orchestra Bookclub discussion

Sorry for the late creation of this discussion! Can't wait to hear your thoughts about The Left Hand of Darkness :-)

Being completely honest.....I put this book down about 2/3 of the way through, I found it so difficult to get into! Hope the rest of you are having more success...!

You can start sharing your thoughts and feelings on the book at any point in your reading experience. If you are including specific details about the plot beyond the blurb please use this text to keep any spoilers hidden unless expressly opened by another member to read - you can let everyone know what point in the book the spoilers pertain to beforehand: <*spoiler*>This is the text that will be hidden.<*/spoiler*> (remove the asterixes*)

So, I really do love Ursula K. LeGuin. I adore her and her work. But with this book I had a seroiously hard time. I was trying to read this book for ages, I had started it again and again, but I never managed to get into it and finish it. So I took the selection for the Feminist Orchestra as a sign to finally finish it and continue on with the Hainish books. And this time I did finish it. I needed to switch to audio, though. I completely get dnf-ing it, I found it really uninteresting a lot of the time. (I'm cringing to say this, I love LeGuin so much!)

It wasn't the extended descriptions so much (I'm actually totally against this show-don't-tell paradigm. So I'll happily read pages of expostion if I get it.) But I just didn't get the book. I didn't connect with the characters for a very long time, I didn't get any of the motivations, I was just kind of confused all the time.

However, in the end I'm really glad that I did finish it - the last part was the best of it. ;-) It really was. The following are mostly minor spoilers, I'd say, but to be on the save side, here goes:
To me it got interesting - and also the writing got really as masterly as I'd expect from LeGuin - (view spoiler)[when Genly Ai ended up in the labor camp. This part was horridly reminiscent of descriptions of GULAG camps that I studied for my degree.
Then followed the journey through the ice where Genly and Estraven finally develop a kind of relationship. These parts were kind of the reward for finally finishing the book for me. ;-) (hide spoiler)] All the exposition of course built up to this point. Because you need to understand about Gethen people and their androgyny to get how they stand to each other - to a certain point. For me, however, it didn't feel so extravagant at all. I find it kind of hard to express how this book left me. Neither the description of the special constitution of Gethen's people or the end of the story offer any kind of resolution, I found. So I definitely agree that this is a very important text, I'm just not quite satisfied with it.

Oh, and the foreword of course is iconic. It's more of an essay and really good.

It's been a number of years since I read Left Hand of Darkness, but I regret that its fame has made it the first Ursula K. LeGuin book that many people read because I've read ALL her books and it is one of her weakest. It's probably my least favorite of the exceptionally strong Hainish/Ekumen "series." She herself critiqued it in several essays, and wrote about how she would have written it differently half a lifetime later. I think it's famous for what ground it broke in when it was first published in 1969.

I do, however, utterly adore her short story set on the same world, "Coming of age in Karhide" which I first read in the collection "The Birthday of the World and other short stories" but I believe it is now in one or two other story collections as well. It is a wonderful celebration of female sexuality, which is not something I see every day, and a glorious vision of how a sex-positive, gender-neutral society might operate. Whether or not a reader finishes "Left Hand" they might want to check out that short story.

This is my fourth book by Ursula Le Guin, and definitely the one I liked the least, I liked the Earthsea novels a bit better, especially The Tombs of Atuan, but even those I enjoyed more because of the concepts they presented rather than the reading experience. I do really like her ideas though, and at times it really got me thinking, so it's a shame that the style was so disagreeable to me. Perhaps I'll give one of her later books a go before I completely dismiss her, since all the books I've read by her are from early in her career.

I have tried to read this book three times. I just couldn't get into it. Also are there going to be books picked for 2020? I have loved many of the books picked.