I'm on a business trip this week. I thought that would give me a lot of time to get caught up writing posts I have thought about but not committed to text yet. So far it hasn't worked out that way.
In the meantime, though, to beguile the hours on airplanes, I have been reading Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. When Wife's good friend D visited us, she strongly recommended it as a meditation on The Other. (That's a big theme in her life.) OK, it is that ... but what I see in it is far more basic, and has a lot to do with the themes of this blog. One thing the book traces in a lot of detail is the absolutely poisonous consequences of chronic lying, and the painful healing that is made possible only by speaking the truth for all to hear.
I want Wife to read this book. I'd recommend it to others too, but in particular ....
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 1
23 hours ago
2 comments:
I read Ender's Game. The ending was too depressing for me to want to read the apparent sequel Speaker for the Dead. But I read the synopsis and I guess it's very much a different story. May have to try it.
Depressing? Hmmm, I wouldn't have thought to characterize it that way. It's possible our tastes are different enough I should be wary of making recommendations. Or did you read the novella? I've only read the book, but I know Card wrote the story as a novella first, years before. Maybe it had a different ending that I don't know.
In any event, Speaker for the Dead is a very, very different book. In some ways it is a sequel in name only -- that is, it has some of the same characters as Ender's Game (Ender himself and his sister Valentine, to take the two most obvious examples) but the storyline has almost nothing to do with the first book. And the style, the pacing, the overall atmosphere ... these are all very different. I like it a lot, but not for the same reasons I liked Ender's Game.
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