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 book (that I also didn't like so jokes on me!) and that's that. I DNFed at 25 percent.

I am realizing that I don't think I even know the protagonist's name in this book. Oh well, well a human goes to a planet called Winter and goggles about the aliens that he meets. I seriously cannot tell you more than this. I started and stopped this book four times and just gave up. I did think that the human being was kind of an ass and seemed to spend most of the 25 percent that I read going on about the aliens and what so and so means.

"It starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide was Odharhahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the Year One. It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One in Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did not know it."

You need to explain to me what half of those damn words even mean. I needed a prologue or something to be put in to explain the backstory. The world building that I have read so far is not there. We as readers are supposed to just go oh Karhide, yes, I totally know where this is. 

"The snow still fell, a mild spring blizzard, much pleasanter than the relentless rain of the Thaw just past."

 

I assume that the word "thaw" being capitalized means that it's something else that I should care about. I don't know. 

"Estraven’s house, sign of the king’s high favor, was the Corner Red Dwelling, built 440 years ago for Harmes, beloved kemmering of Emran III, whose beauty is still celebrated, and who was abducted, mutilated, and rendered imbecile by hirelings of the Innerland Faction."

 

I think at this point I started making myself a gin and tonic.

"Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit."

 

Just words thrown up on my Kindle screen that all together make very little sense.

I never felt connected to this story the entire time I was reading it. I need to feel a connection to what I am reading via the protagonist. Even if that connection is disgust/ire (see Gone Girl, earlier Prey books, etc.) I need to feel something as I am put in the head of the main character. 

I really need to go back and start again. I haven't looked at this in about two weeks.

I have so many books to get through, so don't know when I will get back to this. Maybe Friday.

A lone human ambassador is sent to Winter, an alien world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants can change their gender whenever they choose. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

I did not want this to end. I feel a bit bereft, and very emotional, and somewhat fragile (even if Rocannon's World had prepared me for the possibility). And in awe. Dazzled in awe of how Le Guin can weave this beautiful settings to address concepts, limitations, canons of society, give them new perspectives and lead into discussions well before their time.

She did warn in a way, in that introduction. Because... it might be that I had late access to the Internet, and so was somewhat cut out from the world-dialogue, but it looks to me that talk of gradients and varieties of sex and sexuality (beyond the ever polemical homosexual, bisexual or trans-gender, and those as isolated phenomenons at that), is pretty recent. Yet here it is, served as a "fait acompli" in the form of a world where gender has always been a fluid thing, when it's even a thing, and the protagonist just has to deal, get over and past it, once and for all. Let me tell you, I had some fun mocking the MC over his inability to accept, because at some point, it annoyed me. Which is exactly the point of the book, I think.

Tied to that, all the issues of friendship, love, miss/understanding, acceptance, and what have you, in an epic sprinkled with back-ground myths and wrapped up in a sci-fi package. And by all the literary muses, I loved it.