It’s time for my Midweek Recommendation, in which I commend to your attention books or music or movies or anything I find worth recommending.
As I mentioned in my Sunday Reflection on ‘belonging,’ I am setting out to keep a more regular blog schedule. My plan is to do the following:
Sunday – Post a reflection, some sort of semi-serious thought about faith or work or life or what have you.
Wednesday – Post a recommendation, some sort of book, music or other commendation for your consideration.
Friday – Post something of a more light-hearted nature, often participatory, for some Friday ‘fun.’
For today, my first midweek recommendation, I had intended to take the low road, the easy way, and commend to you my new fantasy novel, The Darker Road. Alas, Amazon still has it listed as for pre-order only, so that would be a tad premature.
So, not having prepared anything else, I will reach for some low hanging fruit and recommend for your reading pleasure, one of my favorite Sci-Fi novels, Ender’s Game.
I first read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game in about 1990, and it has been one of my favorite books ever since. I find that while there are many books I can reread if enough time goes by and still enjoy them, the amount of time I need to let go by before I’m ready for Ender’s Game is relatively small.
As there is a movie version coming out in November, I wanted to make this one of my earliest recommendations. On the off chance that any of my readers haven’t read Ender’s Game yet, I want to strongly recommend reading it before the movie comes out – if you are at all likely to see the movie. It’s possible that the movie will be fantastic, but I think most fans of the book will agree with me that there are elements of the story that could prove hard to translate to the big screen and to do justice in the timeframe of a two hour movie. Hence, I encourage you to read it first.
Ender’s Game tells the story of the brilliant little boy, who’s parents were only allowed to have him as a third child because the military have hopes that he will be the future commander that humanity needs. His older siblings were promising but not quite there. Most of the book takes place at battle school, a satellite where children are trained to be soldiers, primarily through use of the battleroom – and I won’t say any more about that here, so you can enjoy it for yourself.
Ender’s journey, both internal and external, is a joy to read, and the story is executed beautifully. Like any well known book, it has its detractors, but Ender’s Game is one of the most universally beloved books I know, and I’ve given it to many people over the years and made many converts.
Maybe you’ll be one of them.
Orson Scott Card has written many, many more books in what we could call the “Ender Universe” he first introduces here, and while I’ve enjoyed many of them, none come close to recapturing the magic of the original. Check it out!