Book Club Time!
Jul. 6th, 2013 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 09:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 09:48 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 11:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 03:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 03:06 pm (UTC)