This may be my favorite book. A good case can be made that "The Left Hand of Darkness" is a better book--for one thing it has an actual story--but "The Dispossessed" is my favorite. I've probably read it a dozen times and I get something new out of it each time. More thoughts to come as I read it again.
is that the one with the exoplanet thing that is way too small? (I vaguely remember that one planetocopia world mentions that it's a tribute to a world from some anarchist book which had an interesting exoplanet but the only distances given implied that it was far too small for the gravity etc.)
Quick thought on LeGuin's work in chapters 1 and 2. She does a very interesting thing with both chapters. They both start in the present tense as descriptions of a place--in chapter 1, the wall around the port of Abbenay, in chapter 2, a nursery. She then seamlessly slides into the usual third-person past tense description of the thoughts of our viewpoint character. The whole thing is done so subtly that you don't even notice it.
Oh my god, LeGuin! I ended up writing a paper about The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness for a class because we read the first for class and I found the second. Also check out The Lathe of Heaven sometime :o
