The Left Hand of Darkness
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I read this the first time and found it slow, verging on boring. I finished it because my mom loved it and I trust her judgment.
I read it a second time and started picking up on the political undercurrents and subtle communication between characters. This is basically a world where all past disagreements were solved through lengthy discussion. But recently a deadly new weapon has been introduced and some political factions have begun pushing Patriotism at the expense of logic or reason. (Sound familiar?) As the reader you get almost all of your information from the perspective of the human ambassador, so I enjoyed this more the second time through when I had a better idea of what was happening behind the scenes.
The third time I was finally able to fully appreciate it
as an intricate political drama of a society in flux and a story of two wildly different cultures coming together and trying to figure out if they have enough in common to ever understand each other. Maybe even more interesting though, is the gender commentary woven throughout the book. The aliens do not have genders unless they are in their mating season. To them, humans are obscene perverts for wearing our secondary sex characteristics (Adam’s apple, breasts, beard, etc) all the time. To humans, they’re a constant source of stress - constantly showing behaviors as too masculine or too feminine to fit neatly into one box or the other.
I can already hear the rebuttal - but Lon, it’s 2023, and gender isn’t a binary anymore! Why is it interesting to read a book that struggles to think outside of the either/or boxes?
I’m so glad you asked.
Ursula K. Le Guin published this in 1969. Over 50 years ago! It helped create a feminist subgenre in science fiction, and remains one of the most famous thought experiments on androgyny in the broader genre. Reading The Left Hand of Darkness lets us step outside of ourselves to take a different look at how gender impacts daily life. I have no doubt this was groundbreaking when it was published, but language and culture has evolved since to allow authors such as Rebecca Roanhorse or Yoon Ha Lee to go much further with nonbinary characters. As a reader now I enjoy it as a well written political drama but the real draw is the look into what it was to subvert gender norms and expectations in the 60s when this was first published.
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best buddy-reads you could possibly pick up; even after three read throughs I’m noticing new aspects each time, and there’s just so much to dig into from any direction - personal or political, gender or genre. You will have to pay attention to work through the prose style and layers of plot and motivation, so this won’t be a good beach read. But you’ll get out of it what you put in, and I promise it’s worth the effort!
I paired this with a Kahlua and milk, the traditional drink when my mother and I hang out. It’s made purely to taste, with a large splash of coffee liqueur over ice and topped off with milk. The drink is a go-to during the holidays or really anytime it's cold and gray out, which makes it the ideal companion to a book set on such an icy world.
