Book Review — The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

This book is simply incredible — epic in its scale; a scale matched only by the darkness of the veil, the brief glimpses you get of its vastness. Like soft wan milky starlight illuminating the corners and edges of a building so enormous you can't quite comprehend its size. This is what Le Guin does so well. I read once that if you write 600 pages, somebody will read 600 pages. But if you write a thousand pages and edit it down to 600, they will read a thousand pages — because they will still feel those 400 invisible pages. Because they're there. What Le Guin has done in "The Left Hand of Darkness" is build an entire universe outside of Gethen. But at the same scale, she has built the entire world of Gethen itself: its customs, its practices, its language, its history. So much is told, shown, and revealed to the reader in drips and drops. As an underlying thread throughout, the book's subversion of gender norms is extremely interesting. The Gethenian people inhabit an almost…