Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin

Picked by: Judi

Eric: Not a difficult read but a literary journey which seems at least as arduous to traverse as the main characters' nearly three month ice journey which takes up at least a third of the book. While I do not believe that dust-cover-reviews do it justice and I enjoyed it much more than expected, I definitely would not have enjoyed it as much if I had not had the potential of a hearty group discussion at reads end. Perhaps this book suffers from being an artistic pioneer and stylistically copied since, but at my reading, some forty years post-debut, there were parts that seems formulaic and not well polished and other parts that seemed very timely during a post-war, pre-election era which may make its reading during later periods not nearly as pertinent as it was to me. Overall, I considered it to be better than average but not so much so as to be noticeably present on my recommendation list. I would read something else by this author but probably give my copy of the book to the library had I not checked it out from there in the first place.
General Read: 3.5| For Discussion: 4 (potential)


Discussed at Firefly Coffee Shop.