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This blog title should actually say: What I just read (after waiting 6 months to get the book)
It’s true. I went to my local library some time ago to get the sequel to my beloved Ender’s Game novel, only to find out I’m 12th in the queue. Somehow 12 people took well over 6 months to read a 270-some page novel. I got the book on Monday and was finished with it by Thursday and that’s with class from 9 am till 9:30 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays and work in between.
WTF, people? If you want to hang onto the book for weeks at a time then go buy a copy. Seriously, they should have literacy exams before you’re allowed to get books from the library. If you have to sound out the big words you’re card is gone like that. Zap! I’m all for pushing literacy in this country, because God knows it’s bad enough — I think we rank somewhere between Kazakhstan and Bangladesh, but I don’t have any sources to back that up so don’t quote me — but who ever has reading and/or comprehension issues should be reading whatever books fix reading and/or comprehension issues, not Ender’s Game sequels.
The way I see it, these cats read Ender’s Game, right, and they loved it. Genius children in a military school training in zero gravity and always trying to stay a step ahead of each other. Andrew Wiggin who calls himself Ender, of course, emerges as the guy who simply walks ahead of everyone without even trying. What’s not to love there, right?
If you don’t want any spoilers about Ender’s game, as obvious as they may be, continue by reading the next paragraph. Well after the formics are destroyed (oops, spoiler warning) Ender has a nervous breakdown because was makes him so great is his ability to empathize with other people and as it turns out other beings. Another one of Ender’s life philosophies — You must love your enemy to understand them, and beat them — surely plays a role in his breakdown after he discovers that he is responsible for wiping out an entire species.
Ender’s Game was quite action packed and from what I hear they are making it into a movie due out in 2008 sometime. Speaker for the Dead, however, is not nearly as action-packed and is a lot more … philosophical.
Speaker for the Dead is mainly about Ender’s redemption (to me anyway). Since the ending of the first book I could almost feel how guilt stricken Ender was, and a promise needed to be upheld. SFTD occurs many thousand years after the original novel, for Ender and his sister Valentine have been traveling from planet to planet at relativistic speeds (and not getting much older). Ender is a “Speaker for the Dead” which is now an official title as his first books The Hive Queen and the Hegemon — the first telling explains the conflict between humans and formics and the second tells the story of his brother Peter, Hegemon of the Earth — have spawned an entire religion and many speakers who travel and tell the life of the deceased in a very different manner. I’ll let you read the book to figure out what I mean. Ender’s name now used as a curse word, it has far surpassed the infamy of Hitler and Stalin and is almost synonymous with Xenocide which refers to genocide of an alien species. No one knows that Speaker Andrew Wiggin is actually the original speaker for the dead as well as Ender the Xenocide, since that would make him some 3000 years old.
I really don’t know where I was going with this other than to illustrate the burden that’s not just hanging above Ender each day, but is being constantly flung in his face.
So you can see there is a lot more depth to this story as well as the one involving the “piggies” which are another intelligent life form living on a far away planet. So my thought here is, all these cats liked the first book with its action packed chapters, but they struggled to finish the much more important second book because there really weren’t any explosions – only mysteries and questions and Ender’s quest for redemption.
Well next time you want to challenge yourself, please don’t do so at my expense. I suppose I could have just bought the book but that is not really the point now, is it ?
Anyway, the book was awesome and I went to get Xenocide (part III) and they don’t have it at all in the library system. I hope they can order it from somewhere.
