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So recently I had that conversation that people who are hardcore into Le Guin are always having - the one where you start talking to someone about her, and they're like "Oh, I've read those books!" and then you find out that they mean that they read Left Hand of Darkness and Wizard of Earthsea and nothing else. Which is fine! As reading goes, but those are also my two least favorite Le Guin books. I read Left Hand of Darkness when I was a teenager - my mother had a copy on the shelf with all the Elizabeth A. Lynn - and I was just not pleased with it. At all.
But I was talking again with someone who said it was one of their favorite books, and I thought, well, I'll give it a try, so I'm halfway through again.
Everything that annoyed me about it the first time is still there. I really don't like having to critique the narrator's point of view as I go, generally, and when I was younger I hated unreliable narrators SO MUCH. So when it comes to things like how Genly Ai genders everyone around him masculine right up until he doesn't like them or thinks they're ridiculous and then he suddenly starts she-ing them I got annoyed. And I remember when I was a teenager being profoundly irritated that the narration thought "he" was a good generic pronoun - I didn't grow up in an era where "he" was used generically in much of anything, I thought "she" would have done just as well, and I had actually already learned from Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior that there existed such a thing as other pronouns, even if they were unwieldy and people didn't like using them.
Of course, Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior was published in 1982, and I don't know when the discussion of what to do about neutral pronouns for everyday use got added (and even then it was a question of what to do when you don't know someone's presumably binary pronoun, not what to do if they don't want to use one ever, of course). I kind of vaguely understood when I was fifteen that Left Hand of Darkness was a product of its time, in that Genly Ai reminded me of a Heinlein protagonist, but I don't think I was capable of internalizing how much the book was already a historical document - and how much my time is a product of the discussion that that book was part of - when I was that age. Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. This book was published, essentially, during the exact time season six of Mad Men is set in. Genly Ai is, on some level, a contemporary of Don freaking Draper. Imagine Don Draper in Karhide. No, don't, that's a horrible idea.
Sometimes the fact that our narratives around things have changed so fast in fifty years really startles me. And I am aware that to some degree this is because of my own subcultural participation, and that there were demonstrably people having these conversations fifty years ago, too, but when I was fifteen Genly Ai just looked like a super clueless person to me because I could imagine Karhide better than I could imagine the Earth he came from. I don't know. That's just interesting.
But I was talking again with someone who said it was one of their favorite books, and I thought, well, I'll give it a try, so I'm halfway through again.
Everything that annoyed me about it the first time is still there. I really don't like having to critique the narrator's point of view as I go, generally, and when I was younger I hated unreliable narrators SO MUCH. So when it comes to things like how Genly Ai genders everyone around him masculine right up until he doesn't like them or thinks they're ridiculous and then he suddenly starts she-ing them I got annoyed. And I remember when I was a teenager being profoundly irritated that the narration thought "he" was a good generic pronoun - I didn't grow up in an era where "he" was used generically in much of anything, I thought "she" would have done just as well, and I had actually already learned from Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior that there existed such a thing as other pronouns, even if they were unwieldy and people didn't like using them.
Of course, Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior was published in 1982, and I don't know when the discussion of what to do about neutral pronouns for everyday use got added (and even then it was a question of what to do when you don't know someone's presumably binary pronoun, not what to do if they don't want to use one ever, of course). I kind of vaguely understood when I was fifteen that Left Hand of Darkness was a product of its time, in that Genly Ai reminded me of a Heinlein protagonist, but I don't think I was capable of internalizing how much the book was already a historical document - and how much my time is a product of the discussion that that book was part of - when I was that age. Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. This book was published, essentially, during the exact time season six of Mad Men is set in. Genly Ai is, on some level, a contemporary of Don freaking Draper. Imagine Don Draper in Karhide. No, don't, that's a horrible idea.
Sometimes the fact that our narratives around things have changed so fast in fifty years really startles me. And I am aware that to some degree this is because of my own subcultural participation, and that there were demonstrably people having these conversations fifty years ago, too, but when I was fifteen Genly Ai just looked like a super clueless person to me because I could imagine Karhide better than I could imagine the Earth he came from. I don't know. That's just interesting.
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I have never thought of it that way, but you're right, that's a really interesting observation and totally true.
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(So what is your favourite? I like The Wind's Twelve Quarters and Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Dispossessed and the second and third Western Shore books best, probably. Though I've been meaning to re-read Earthsea on account of everyone else loves it so.)
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(Left Hand of Darkness is still one of my favorites but then I adore unreliable narrators... and still haven't gotten around to reading as many of the Ekumen novels as I'd like.)
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I love Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Dispossessed! My favorite might be The Telling, though. I don't know, actually, the short story collections are way up there for me. I should give Earthsea another try, though. I really loved Tehanu!
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She really is a master of the short story. I keep going back to "The Day Before The Revolution", which just blows me away every time, the complicatedness of the political movements, all the bickering and in-fighting and well-meaning mistakes, and the passion for a new way. And Odo, old and fragile and feeling like a failure. It's just - amazing. Do you read Kim Stanley Robinson? I get the same love and affection for left-wing political organising out of a lot of his books, and it's so great.
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I love Sutty a lot - she's full of terrible blind spots, which is kind of nice to read in one of Le Guin's idealistic academics, and she's probably the character who's most like myself in anything that I've read.
My favorite part of The Day Before the Revolution was always that throw-away line about what it would be like to imagine the body as something other than a worrisome personal possession. I've thought about that a lot.