300 pages but wow it felt 4 times longer...

I found the writings quite difficult to consume. A lot, if not all the names were sounds but without any familiar rhythm, and Le Guin was describing, with I assume great accuracy a world with locations, cities, regions and mountains - but I was struggling to map it all.

Then the story was thread through this detail, which left me struggling to read and struggling to enjoy the book.

It's only when I hit around 60% and the two characters embark on a journey across the ice did I finally manage to engage properly. I really did feel the characters relationship change through their journey and felt their struggle, which I think is what turned this book, for me, from 2 star to 3.

There's a scene towards the end when the protagonist revisits the King of {whatever the name of the city was}, and the protagonist reflects on how the time has passed since his first visit much earlier in the book. I could empathise! It felt like a lifetime!

Probably a great book. Maybe passed me by though.

8 Highlights

#1/8 - Location 15

I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We've followed our road too far.

#2/8 - Location 22

a musty chill on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.

#3/8 - Location 58

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

#4/8 - Location 77

I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman.

#5/8 - Location 82

The king was pregnant.

#6/8 - Location 109

The man was like an electric shock—nothing to hold on to and you don't know what hit you.

#7/8 - Location 146

served breakfast: grain-porridge and beer.

#8/8 - Location 184

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.