I am dithering between three and four stars for this book. I have a huge amount of respect for the ideas, not only for the unusual gender roles and sexuality the book is famous for, but also for the general theme of duality and otherness that is weaved throughout the book. There’s a lot to think about and to explore in this book as metaphor.

My issue is that the plot wanders, often focuses on subtle and arcane interpersonal politics, and there are whole sections that are just deadly dull. I found myself skimming a lot, especially toward the end when there’s a long long passage of the characters wandering through descriptions of the landscape. I also did not find the characters well formed or well differentiated, and as the point of view shifts from chapter to chapter it usually took me a little while to figure out who was talking.

I was also somewhat disappointed that although gender is a central question and theme of the book, I felt the book often did not go far enough in presenting a society that is wholly gender fluid. The premise is that all of the people on the planet Gethen are are male for the majority of the time, but can become female during “kemmer,” a once-a-month sort of heat or estrus. But the experience of kemmer is little described, and none of the characters are presented in their female form. Le Guin uses the “he” pronoun for every character, and although some characters are described as “effeminate” (in mildly disparaging terms), all the characters come across as very male. I recognize that it’s difficult to apply modern gender politics to a book that was written in the 1960s, and that I myself may have trouble recognizing the complexities of a gender fluid society, just as Genly Ai does in the book itself. But I felt that the duality themes would have been stronger if both male and female forms were represented, or if the androgyny of the “male” characters was more clearly explored.