I love LeGuin, largely because she is, fundamentally, a story-teller. Most of her books and stories are anthropological/sociological investigations, tied to a story, sort of "Here is a world where people marry in a complex pattern of two men and two women, this is what such a society might look like" coupled with "Here is a woman in this world who is lesbian, and chafes under the rigid social structure. She doesn't want a husband. Here is her struggle to find love and happiness." She often comes back to a society she creates and tells different stories. This is particularly true of the Hain universe stories, where the Hain are an ancient race of intergalactic explorers who train people from planets with more recent history to be sociologists.
What is so wonderful about LeGuin is that her alternate societies are really interesting, and even better, her stories have characters drawn with real emotional depth, and she doesn't rely on standard tropes or stereotypes.
Malafrena is not part of her interplanetary explorations, but is a series of linked short stories taking place from the medieval to the modern period in a fictional middle-European country. They are just stories, without a framework of an unusual society. They are poignant, often emotionally deep character studies. I really enjoyed the book, but they are not LeGuin's usual fair. I can understand how some might not like them, but they are really interesting for themselves. They are non-fantasy stories by a wonder speculative fiction author.
Always Coming Home is almost the other side of things. It is essentially a fictional anthropologist's notebook about a society, with a minor story of someone in that society fighting the rigidities, but in many ways it is the society itself that is the focus of this work. I didn't find it nearly as compelling as most of LeGuin's work, but I did read it (I'm a completionist)
Speaking of stories a little outside the norm, one of my favourite of LeGuin's stories is
The Shobie's Story from
Fisherman of the Inland Sea, which is a really interesting conceptual story about the psychological experience of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel.
