The first OSC book I read was his book on writing. In it, he talks at one point about how all of these teenagers who were Clever Children read Ender's Game and told him how perfectly it captured their own experiences in a way no other book ever had. So when I read EG, it was with that in mind: that it was supposed to be amazingly insightful to my experience as a Clever Child.

And, well. I rather enjoyed most of it, though I hated how he handled the female characters. But it wasn't insightful at all. It was nothing like my experience. None of the children acted like any children I had ever known. (I had a sheltered upbringing.) So I sat around thinking, am I just not as clever as I thought? What am I missing that all these other people got out of the book? Of course, it was possible that the author just wasn't very good at assessing his own books, since he'd talked about not liking English teachers finding Symbolism in things, so he'd written EG without any, and by god, any student forced to find symbolism in there would know it really didn't exist! Which was ludicrous, because there is BLATANTLY OBVIOUS symbolism all over the place in that book.

Then I read the sequel and didn't really like it, and sort of shrugged off the series.