The Left Hand of Darkness -- very different from the Earthsea books in style and tone, I'd have said, but the best of the three you've got in my view -- it's also an adventure story, with some exciting moments. Some of my thoughts on it when I read it about 10 years ago:
Well written, with some touches I loved, but like in The Dispossessed, she sets up two contrasting and antipathetic systems of politics/government which seemed a little schematic to me – perhaps an inevitable preoccupation during the Cold War. I've read that it was seen as a feminist novel, since the world she writes about, Gethen, is comprised of hermaphrodites/androgynes, and therefore lacking the male/female dominant/subservient roles of our own societies. To me, though, it felt that she was writing about men all the time, albeit ones who had semi-feminine body shapes and a lack of upper body strength. I was also far from convinced by the main character, Genly Ai, who is a kind of ambassador for first contact situations, and whose job is to persuade Gethen to join an inter-planetary union. In the very first chapter he leaps to a conclusion about the motives of the other main character, Estraven, which is so irrational and without context that I never recovered from thinking he was a complete prat, which I'm pretty sure isn't the reaction I was intended to have.
I'd read
The Dispossessed a few months before that, and it's is very much a political novel. My thoughts at the time:
That was a thought-provoking book, and one I can admire for its writing and world-building, but I can't say I actually liked it. The physics, of which there was a great deal, was utterly beyond me, and the talk about the various socio-economic systems, of which there was a great deal more, wasn't quite as impactful as it might have been when it was first written, and the so-called utopia of the anarchist society repelled me.
Malafrena I tried about 4 years ago and couldn't get even half-way through before giving up. It's set in an analogue of a Mitteleuropa country in the equivalent of our C19th with all the political and social upheavals of the time, and it does feel like a C19th novel, with all the heft and revolutionary thought and endless bloody talking. My comment at the time:
Turgid.
