finished this book and immediately handed it off to a friend out of the need to share such a brilliant read. it’s hard to compare le guin’s works, because they are all so phenomenal that i could never pick a favourite, but more than any other works of hers i felt particularly surprised by the wry humour in this book. as always, the message is political, personal, thought provoking - it seamlessly gives us a world so entirely foreign to everything we know, then makes our world seem like the strange one. she writes about Anarres like it’s a real place she’s been to, not an impossible planet a universe away, and yet in its neighbour planet Urras, and the major city A-Io, we see every city we’ve ever visited. Shevek is a perfectly imperfect, if at times boring or hard to follow, protagonist, and all the background characters are both charming and deeply confusing at times. Le Guin writes of revolution in a way so perfectly and painfully accurate, creates a utopia with more flaws than we could fathom, shows the reality that comes with the fight for freedom and justice. never one to ignore intersectional inequalities, Le Guin ridicules ingrained power structures on class and gender lines, all while focusing on an alternative to capitalist life so imperfect it becomes hard not to believe in. 

the book also, in a much less important but still fun way, has a great connection to other Hainish cycle books, showing the battle fought for something later taken for granted (the ansible), and demonstrating the ultimately cyclical nature of time - in the end, for all Shevek’s hopes and dreams for the world, what ever really changes? 

Ursula K. LeGuin can do no wrong, IMO. I swear I highlighted half of this book. “An ambiguous uptopia” really sums it up. 

Still don't know what exactly to say about this book, but it was an interesting exploration of the implications of how different societies both shape and are shaped by the people who participate in them.
I'm gonna ruminate on it for a little bit and then later do a more thorough review.