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First let me say, this has to be one of my all time favourite book titles. I'm talking about the title itself: The Left Hand of Darkness. I'm not totally convinced it and the book go perfectly together (even though it's a quote from the book) but I still love that title.
Now to the book itself. It's been years since I last read it, and I think it has stood up quite well ... considering.
The first half of this is a bit inconsistent in pace and presentation, and that makes it hard going in places - by today's standards, although I think the style was fairly typical in science fiction back when this was written. The further you get in the more involving and evocative it becomes. Overall I enjoyed it as a science fiction story with a strongly human aspect (and I much prefer this sort of thing over technical expositions, or space-opera and space-thriller type books).
It is, now, an acknowledged classic, based - as I understand it - on its treatment of gender. But my reading of it is that the gender aspects were not originally intended to be of the strength since ascribed to them. Rather, like most science fiction, the entire story is a "what if" question of which gender is just one aspect. For example the developing relationship between Genly and Estraven is obviously central to the story, and this is about ambition, foresight, friendship, loyalty, betrayal and failure to understand one another; gender is in there behind all that, it is important to the story, but it's not the entire story.
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