Book Club Time!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Today's Discussion Question:

Show of hands, people. Did anyone else here besides me just not like Ender's Game? I'm not talking about the prevalent opinion of "Love the book. Shame about the author's raging douchenozzlery," which is a totally fair opinion to have. I'm talking about just being ragingly, compulsively unimpressed by the book itself.

I read it back in junior high, see. I think it was before I knew that Orson Scott Motherfucking Card was an unmitigated jackass, but I can't be entirely sure, since he's also a big source of pride for Utah and for a while he wrote a column for the Deseret News, the conservative Mormon paper around here.* I do recall getting a sense that he was a jerk from the book, but a poll of my classmates (we read it for class--Utah pride, remember) told me that nobody else got that sense,** and I've met a lot of cool folks since then who also didn't get that vibe.

But anyway, the upshot is that Ender's Game has always left me cold. I did not like or care about the characters. I did not really care about their fear of aliens, or their Battle Room strategies, or the kids' petty squabbles, or Val and Peter's Blogging For Change campaign. I spotted the twists before they happened and just thought the fact that Ender didn't made him seem kind of dim. The only thing I really liked was the revelation of the buggers' Oh Shit Moment when they realized they'd made a grievous assumption--and that was mostly an aside.

I know a lot of folks love it--pretty much everyone I talk to. So I'm just wondering--did anybody else have this response? Or was it just me?


*I'm not sure if he still does; frankly, I don't feel like looking it up.

**This doesn't prove anything, though, since some years later in high school only a select few of my classmates picked up on the fact that the chapter in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend in which the terrifyingly intense creepy stalker dude confesses to the hapless object of his desires that he is pretty literally crazy for her and he wants--and DESERVES!--to live inside her skin and breathe her breaths or somesuch was not supposed to be SWOONINGLY ROMANTIC. In retrospect, that discussion was a pretty good predictor of the success of Twilight.

Comments

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I got the vague sense when I read it that anyone who wrote that smugly about a cast of such incredible jerks couldn't really be someone that I'd enjoy hanging out with. The setting interested me more than the characters and the plot, actually. That happens sometimes.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

God, yes. I did not LIKE the characters. Sometimes that's okay, but in this case I had to at least somewhat like them so the story could progress, and I DIDN'T.

And you are right--what with his failure to grasp feminism and his galloping homophobia (to which he once wrote a rebuttal pedantically noting that he isn't homoPHOBIC; he's not AFRAID of them, you see ...), it's easy to overlook that he's just an all-around annoyingly smug bastard, too.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Most of the time, if I don't like the characters, I just can't like the book. I think I may have offended my dad accidentally by putting down a series he enjoys because I found the protagonist absolutely unlikable.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think it works better in movies, where it's possible to have a camera's-eye-view. But it still has to be done right. I enjoyed the first Paranormal Activity, where liking the characters is not really a requirement to enjoy the concept of SPOOOOKY THINGS HAPPENING. But if you're going to tell a character-driven story, dammit I'd better LIKE the characters. (I had the same problem with Song of Ice And Fire.)

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Likewise on Song of Ice and Fire, as well as finding it too grittily uncomfortable and excruciating. It falls into the category with the Wheel of Time series, where I was told, "The fourth book is a real slog, but just force your way through it, it gets better after that!" Nope. Done.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Wheel Of Time? No, it doesn't get better after the fourth book, trust me.