I don't very often leave comments concerning covers, but this particular edition is just plain strange. And slightly creepy, in a way that the text itself was absolutely not. (That double-headed ice person looks like it's about to come alive and start eating people.)

But anyway. This has been on my list of things to read for a long time now, and I've finally gotten round to it. It lived up to its reputation as thoughtful and original, and I can very clearly see the influence that being the daughter of an anthropologist has had on Le Guin. It's similar in that respect to Always Coming Home, except that The Left Hand of Darkness is more character-focused and therefore more entertaining (at least to me). But there's still that scholarly sort of distance there, which is something I often find when reading this author. A sort of cool, detached type of prose - and when Le Guin does this, as she does with some of the Earthsea books (particularly the first) it's hard for me to love the outcome. I like it very much, but I simply don't feel emotionally connected to any of the characters. When that connection does come, in Le Guin's work, the characters are inevitably female. Such, clearly, is not the case here, and while I admire what she's done with gender - it's fluid and non-permanent - I can't help but feel that the Envoy's outsider status, especially when it comes to the experience of gender, is contributing to that sense of distance. The chapter "The Question of Sex" is literally field notes from an observer writing up a report, for goodness sake...