The Dispossessed

Here is a novel stuffed with ideas about society, politics, gender roles, economics, anarchism, scientific theory, and xenophobia. That is more or less the way the this book had always been presented to me, and I assumed it would a tedious if not impossible read.

But LeGuin is a literary artist with the skills to embody these ideas in characters and play them out in actions that vary from cocktail parties among the cultural elite, to riots in the streets, to the occasional late night conversation between earnest young people just beginning to make life decisions.

Obviously I love this book. I can't believe it took me almost forty years to get around to reading it.