Leguin’s The Dispossessed

I recently finished Ursula Leguin’s excellent novel, The Dispossessed. It features a moon of a planet inhabited by refugee anarcho-communists who fled their “propertarian” planet to live out the ideals of their revolution. The main character, Shevek, is a physicist who tries a couple hundred years later to bring their two populations back in touch with one another.

Leguin is one of my, if not the singular, favorite authors. It happens really often with her books that I am left feeling like, Damn, that was one of the best books I’ve ever read. Apart from the original Earthsea trilogy (even the later ones are good), another book of hers I had that reaction to was The Left Hand of Darkness. Her writing is just so intimate and intuitive, and both dark and lucid at the same time. I love it. This latest one, reading certain passages, I almost cried like 5-6 times. That’s a rare occurrence for me in reading; she just hit all the write notes as a writer. She got it.