Left Hand Darkness

An absolute delight! As a thought experiment about different ways gender might work, this is already an excellent, compelling book, but its genius is that it's also a compelling story, a great exploration of how people react to the unfamiliar, and an exposition of Le Guin's daoism, and a critique of nationalism. Somehow she managed to cram all of those things into one not especially long book and make it work well as all of them together.



I'm very late to discovering how great Le Guin was--this is the first non-YA novel I've read by her--and wishing I'd started much earlier.