Post 500! (also, manipulating children)

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (Starscape, 1977, 2002)

So, Card's a little controversial. But if I knocked every author off the list for having views I find abhorrent (ahem, Tolstoy) I'd have a reading list of approximately zero. What really interested me in this book is how many of my male friends have told me this was the book that made them like reading. (Awww!) And yet, without the movie coming out, I might never have gotten around to reading it.

In brief, Ender is a genius. He's been monitored for much of his young life to see if he is The One who will help them win the ongoing war against alien creatures called Buggers. (Ugh, that name.) So he's chosen and gets sent to Battle School with a bunch of other similar kids, and there's training and strategy and armies and creepy psychological games, etc. These are interspersed with conversations between Colonel Graff, Ender's champion, and various other military figures. Oh, and along the way we digress for a whole crazy side plot involving Ender's two siblings (also geniuses) and their attempts to shape world policy by becoming (what would now be known as) Internet intellectual personalities.

And the games get harder and the psychological toll more brutal, with each step more trying than the last. It was hard to read, especially as you keep remembering that Ender is a child - his classmates too. He is six at the start of the book, and twelve (if I remember right) at the end of the main action. Genius or not, it's too much.

That said, it's delightful reading Ender's analyses and strategies. He's definitely clever and unorthodox. It's much easier to stay in the games themselves than to journey outside them, to the hard stuff. And then the end of the book, post-climax, goes off in all sorts of crazy directions. (In my opinion, the film handled this much better.)

To conclude, I'm glad I read this, and I understand why it meant so much to so many young readers, but it was a challenging book in many of the wrong ways. I need something that makes me despair a little less.

On a quest

The Lightning Thief - Rick Riordan (Hyperion Books, 2005)


First of all, I'm moving! While this is fantastic news, I find moving totally stressful, and am getting mixed messages about whether I'm normal in how completely nutty I get around moving. Which means that I simultaneously have no time whatsoever to read and want nothing more than to just curl up and lose myself in a story.

And Percy Jackson provides just the right kind of story. I remember thinking when the series first came out that is sounded like a way of cashing in on the success of Harry Potter, and truth be told it's difficult to avoid that feeling. But kids who are "different" at some sort of boarding school is a children's literature trope that long predates JK Rowling.

I'm getting off topic. Percy is just finishing sixth grade at the start of the novel, and trouble always seems to find him. Which is why he gets sent from school to school. Turns out this is because he is the son of a human woman and an god from Olympus. Oops. And not just any god.... So while a huge part of the story is about Percy's attempts to fit in and find his place in the world - difficult even in a camp filled with half-bloods like him - what drives the plot is his efforts to, well, save the world by taking on an almost impossible mission. And in so doing, clear his name and gain his father's recognition. Plenty going on, and pretty much all the kind of themes that resonate with kids Percy's age.

But readers of all ages can find enjoyment in Percy's story. I struggled a bit with the 12 y.o. male narrator and a writing style that I found too much that of a 12 y.o. male. So my problem, not the book's. But once I accepted Percy's voice for what it was, I had a great time in his world. I'll be looking for the rest of the series. (And Riordan's series involving the Egyptian gods, I believe!)

The Golden Compass

One of the reasons I was slow in getting to The Girl with No Shadow is that I was determined to finish the next book club selection first. Some date tbd we are going to meet to discuss Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first entry in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

While reading, I was reminded of how lovely stories for young readers can be. How magical, and allegorical, and balanced between danger and safety. I was too old when this series first appeared to read it as a child, and I often found myself wondering what the experience would have been. Would I have identified with young Lyra? Or were there little moments in which Pullman hit false notes? Would they have mattered? (I have always leaned toward getting swept away by books - I am good at suspending my disbelief.)

Reading the novel now, I thought instead about the parallel universe in which Lyra lives, where people's souls (to oversimplify) reside in animal daemons. I thought about the little nods toward history - or moments in history where two paths diverged into separate universes. I wondered about how different things would be if the emotions you normally learned to keep hidden were on overt display. I meditated on the notion of loneliness - Lyra is terrified by the very notion of what it would be like to ever be without her daemon, Pantalaimon - and whether children feel that intense loneliness. I puzzled over the class distinctions, particularly at first before the plot took off and left most of those questions behind.

And perhaps most strangely, I stopped and thought about this passage, and wondered why it reminded me of Derrida:

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Not only did I play with it as far as an idea of meaning residing on the margins, which is where Lyra leaves her plan so that it cannot disappear, but I also stopped to consider myself and my friends. Our predilection toward overanalysis. This right here seems to me an simple and elegant explanation for why we should stop making ourselves crazy by overthinking. Grasping at straws (to begin some fun mixing of metaphors) we cause the very soap bubble we desire to pop.

I'll eventually take on books two and three. Looking forward to seeing where Lyra's adventures take her.