Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Could Not Get Into This One: DNF at 25 Percent

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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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

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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 […]



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