The Left Hand of Darkness

“Praise then darkness and creation unfinished”

The Left Hand of Darkness: A Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

September 12, 2026 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

Cbr18bingo Left The Left Hand of Darkness is a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel first published in 1969. It is the story of an alien envoy named Genly Ai who has come to a remote planet called Gethen or Winter in order to speak to its leaders about joining the Ekumen, a kind of alliance of other worlds devoted to the service and betterment of humanity. Genly has arrived at a time when the nations of this planet are on the verge of war, […]

Could Not Get Into This One: DNF at 25 Percent

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

August 8, 2019 by Classic 4 Comments

I tried. Really. I hate it when I don’t get into a classic. I have been told for years that I should read Ursula K. Le Guin and how much I would like her and maybe I should just try something else. This book didn’t make any sense to me. I kept reading words and going what in the world does this mean? And some of the sentences/paragraphs felt overly written. I just finally decided that I wasn’t enjoying it and moved on to another […]

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

October 15, 2018 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

CBR10Bingo – Birthday! (Ursula LeGuin October 21) To paraphrase Octavia Butler is talking about her novel “Survivor,” her book she kind of abandoned to out of print status: it was her Star Trek novel. This means that ultimately what she felt was happening in that novel was too conceit-heavy, too tropey, and too much about discovery of a weird alien race and then turning into a kind of hackneyed sci fi Golden Age schlock. In the two first Hain novels, there’s a kind of teetering […]

A sci-fi introspective on gender and human society

October 10, 2017 by Aquillia Leave a Comment

I’m not normally a sci-fi reader, but that was part of the reason I decided to give The Left Hand of Darkness a try: I had an audible credit to use, I wanted to give Le Guin another chance, and the description said this was a classic sci-fi title. I think because I’m not familiar with the genre, the difficulty I’d had with the age of A Wizard of Earthsea didn’t bother me as much here, even though it was originally published in 1969. Sometimes groundbreaking doesn’t […]

Eve
on Such Promise, So Disappointing
Helpful review!
Emmalita
on “Eleanor, by the wrath of God, queen of the English.”
Happy Cannonball, even if it’s a 2 star review. The review is delightful, clearly more so than the book.
KimMiE"
on My most surprising 5-star read of the year (also Cannonball, finally)
This sounds amazing. I generally restrict my true crime to pre-20th century, but this is going on my TBR. Congrats...
Jen K
on My most surprising 5-star read of the year (also Cannonball, finally)
Happy Cannonballs! I absolutely loved this one - I usually also don’t do much true crime so I loved how...
narfna
on a point by point rebuttal of the manosphere’s views on dating and gender, broadly
Added to the TBR!

Help Our Mission