@Pent Oo, I've not read Pillars of the Earth. Will be interested to see if it improves.
@Spritelady impressive list!
I hit fifteen books by the end of 2023, so here's some notes on the last two, an extremely wintery pair and both thus very appropriate for the time of year.
One was the short Once Upon A Time In The North, by Philip Pullman. I have to say, this one isn't a massively complex book but I loved it. It's two of my favourite Pullman characters, Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison, on their first meeting having a run-in with a nasty populist political figure. And that, sometimes, is basically everything I want in a story: a very readable length at just 100 pages, characters with a dynamic that is comradely without being boring, side-characters who feel real and yet tie in well to the narrative, and a good balance between gentle tension, quiet conversational moments, and a bit of solid adventure work to cap it all off well. It's probably one that needs the reader to have read His Dark Materials (not the Book of Dust etc, but the original trilogy), so it has that entry barrier, but regardless I think it's now one of my favourite Pullman books and I would also kind of like more novellas in my life, a book I can do in one sitting where the sitting is shorter than most of a day has its uses.
I also read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin, the quality of which can be summed up with the words "by Ursula le Guin". It took me a little while to get into - I think her stuff sometimes does for me - but I think in particular there's not another SFF writer I can think of who reaches her exceptional grasp and use of metaphor, and the quality of that drew me fairly inexorably in. It's a very thoughtful story, and hugely interesting in historical context, and famously with its androgynous human folk as a key part of the novel exploring different ideas about gender and its potential construction. The contrast is made more stark than it might be if the novel was written today: the main character, written with attitudes perhaps more typical of men at the time it was written, is written largely as a very empathetic, progressive sort of figure but does at times feel faintly distant from my own world, nominally his own, in one or two of his thought processes when viewed with my 2020s views on gender, sex and sexuality. I think the specific androgyne culture of the book is really interesting in its own right and is written carefully and sensitively, nonetheless.
I think the things that will stay with me, though, are in particular some of the almost visual aspects as well as some of the characters. As for the former, le Guin writes hugely evocative descriptions, especially of the ice though also the cities are really interestingly described and are great fuel for rethinking how settlements can fit together. Conversely to one of the arguable points of the book, I think I found as much empathy for Estraven as Genly of the main characters. Estraven is a character type I'd hugely like to see more of, someone who is a fundamentally good character and whose abillity is essentially that of the chessmaster: we tend to be a culture that has scheming villains and straightforward heroes, and against that Estraven is a complex, messy, scheming hero, liminal in their position in the world and treading a complex dance between factions, cultures and mores. I'd really like to see more characters in fiction written like that.
