Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #16

I finished The Left Hand of Darkness. Overall I wasn't too impressed. I mentioned last week that the book picks up halfway through, but it still ends up feeling kind of long-winded. I think there was about a novella's worth of material here stretched to 300+ pages. It's possible that the bond between the leads wouldn't work as well in a shorter form, and that was the strongest part of the story, but I'm not sure the extra length is worth it.

This is one of the few occasions I find myself completely agreeing with a wokoid critique of something. Specifically, the use of almost exclusively male pronouns and words like "man," "brother," etc. to refer to the supposedly genderless inhabitants of Gethen. It just erases a lot of the feeling of a gender neutral setting. Singular they or a made up pronoun also would have felt kind of odd, but SF often engages in odd word games, and doing so would have been forgivable in this context. The most charitable interpretation of this artistic choice is that the protagonist is kind of a chauvinist and sees the heckin enbies as just lesser/defective men (and there is some evidence of that in the story), but by the end he's clearly accustomed to and comfortable with the way things work on this world, and his way of describing the characters doesn't really change.

I also started reading a Neil Gaiman story collection. First up was the wonderful (if slightly unsatisfying) "A Study in Emerald," a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story set in a world where the European royalty are Lovecraftian entities who conquered Earth 700 years ago. Gaiman is good at getting weird high concepts to work, and he pulls it off quite well here. My only complaint is that this story really felt like it should have been the first couple chapters of a novel instead of a standalone. Then again, it may be better to leave the reader wanting more instead of being kind of worn out (which is how I felt by the end of The Left Hand of Darkness).