This is a long-overdue “books that I’ve read recently” blog post.
I simply can’t believe this was written almost 50 years ago. Winter planet Hainish saga novel about a planet with almost perpetual winter (in foreword it is said that she among other things studied how Finns deal with cold) and where people lack external gender markers and are asexual apart from few days each month they develop either male or female characteristics for a moment and are sexually active then and only then. Loved it a lot, perhaps even more than an “average” Le Guin book even if I don’t care too much about descriptions of winter. I lived through enough of them, I don’t need to read about them. 🙃
Novella where the planet is a big globe of forests. Themes are more in your face this time, riffing on colonization and environmental themes. Not quite “Left Hand of Darkness” but not many books are. Loved the forest as a place for action, more books should have that.
Third book of the Discworld Series about female wizard and how you can’t really be one in the mainly male business. Lovable and more somber than earlier two books. Probably liked it more because the humour was less on the nose in this book.
Book from 2021, the second instalment of the Teixcalaan series is an amazing book. A perfect space opera that makes you think about identity, languages, first contacts, empires and smaller nations. Major leap up from the first book that already was a very, very good sci-fi novel.
Not sure if I covered this already but one of the foundational studies on Ethics and virtues. Interesting while I feel like that I would need to know a whole lot more about the tradition that followed from there and also perhaps read it through one more time soon.
Almost through all of the “Incerto” series. I find NNT entertaining and I always change my thinking on something after reading anything by him. What I have gathered from these books is that average moments in our lives are far less important than the one’s that occur rarely but have a big impact
Next on my reading list:
Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman
Training from the Back of the Room! by Sharon L. Bowman