what a strange beginning

The book I am currently reading is The Left Hand of Darkness. I find this book to be pretty strange because I usually don’t read books about aliens, other worlds, and a lot of made-up words. Not only am I unfamiliar with this genre, I also found this book hard to understand. The first chapter of the book, the one about the parade, was hard to understand because of the language and exotic words to start off with. However, the next chapter, the place in the blizzard, was much easier to understand. A word that stood out and is repeatedly used later on is “kemmering.” At first, in the context of the chapter, I thought that word meant an attraction, a relationship, possibly sexual implications. Also, because “kemmering” was used involving brothers, a thought that came to my mind was incest, and I was repulsed. However, as I continued to read this book, later chapters made it clear what “kemmering” was; the last couple of days where you’re either male or female. I no longer have a bad connotation of that word now that I know what it means in the book’s context. In chapter four, the nineteenth day, foretelling was introduced, the ability to tell the future. Initially, my first thought about telling the future was Bead Women. In class, we recently read Bead Women, a story about women telling the future through beads and patterns. However, I found it strange how the first question asked to be answered was “on what day shall I die?” Personally, I would not want to know when I am going to die or any other information relating to that topic. Death is a sketchy topic to me that I am not comfortable talking about. Also, I thought the last question asked at the end of the chapter was a little weird. Instead of asking when someone is going to die, the question was “how long would the person live?” To me, that seems like the same question is being asked, only phrased differently.