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Divine Wind— I felt all smart and cool for getting the allusion about Divine Wind, and then OSC bruises my fragile ego by giving it, or part of it, away!
On the paperback version I have, the plot summary, which is just that, on the back really infantilizes the story, which is much more than just its plot. I thought a better version might have asked "What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be alive?"
I think the reason I didn’t finish the book the first time was that Ender is so pathetic in it, after a few thousand years of being anything but pathetic (in the modern sense, he was always pathetic in the older sense.) Of course, I shall doubtless be much more pathetic still in a thousand + years and Peter and Young Valentine do a good job of being Ender, which they are (I guess.)
Finally, OSC's Afterward was incredible, even by his usual standards in introductions/ post scripts.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Children of the Mind, I thought, continued to humanize Ender. I'll admit, the Ender Set of books really gets me in a way that the Bean series doesn't.
While the Bean series is a lot of action, and interesting; Ender's series is very introspective.
I found the way that CoTM and others were played to be so thoughtful about the purpose of people. In a sense, I view all of them as a debate on calvinism, guilt, shame, and purpose. Ender and others continually deal with what they blame themselves for; things that they cannot forgive themselves for; and how they judge their own lives.
And, I'll be honest, the dialog of Miro in all of the books to be so dead on that I still consider it some of Card's best writing.
Posts: 202 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I think that the Ender series was more detailed in the thoughts and emotional state of characters then the shadow series. Although I do like the shadow series more. Bean is my favorite character. Posts: 96 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Pelegius, i to didnt finish CotM the first time i read it. i couldnt get past the few graphic chapters with Peter and Wang Mu. but then again when you finish up SftD and go straight to CotM your all excited but SftD and to go straight into a book that has to explain lots of new concepts to you, one has to somewhat calm themselves down a bit before reading lol or at least i had to but it was still a great book i thoroughly enjoyed it and am trying to take my time reading the last book in the shadow series so i dont have so much time after finishing it before the next book comes out< even though we have no idea when that will be> Posts: 50 | Registered: Feb 2006
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I'm reading CotM for a second time now and i find that i am enjoying it much much more. i enjoyed it immensely the first time, of course, but i think that i read through it too fast and missed a lot of the explanations. like lisha said, i was so hyped after Xenocide and all that happened, i was just anxious to get to the action. but there is so much more in the explanation that make the book worth reading. i'm liking it a lot more and understanding so much more of it. i have a feeling that the third time through will be even better.
by the by, how do you pronounce "aiua"? i always say aura in my head, is it the same thing?
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by lisha_rose: Pelegius, i to didnt finish CotM the first time i read it. i couldnt get past the few graphic chapters with Peter and Wang Mu.
I really don't recall any "graphic" chapters with Peter and Wang-mu... The closest thing that comes to mind is when he teased her about her breast size.
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I don't know why, but the moment Peter "awoke with Wang-mu curled into the curl of his body, like shrimps lined up on a market rack" is one of my favourite ones. Maybe because of the sheer feeling of closeness, which is the first time for Peter.
I also like very much the whole Japanese thread: OSC gives a very disctinct feel to all the different planets (and cultures they stem from) he describes: not only that, but the differences are actually based on the historical background of each culture. What with OSC's amazing Afterward, it always makes me want to know more about everything on this good Earth , about each nation's history and culture and how it might evolve.
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I always prononced it A-kill-EES in my head, even though I know it is supposed to be Ash-ill-EES or something like that.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: I always prononced it A-kill-EES in my head, even though I know it is supposed to be Ash-ill-EES or something like that.
I believe it was described as "ah-SHEEL" in Ender's Shadow, with the mentioned origin being French.
I'm thinking of the scene after Bean writes a diary entry mentioning him, where Graff and Carlotta are discussing it. Carlotta realizes that the name was taken from something Bean wrote and not said because Graff was pronouncing the name incorrectly.
This is from memory so correct me if I'm wrong.
Although, even with this pronounciation clearly stated in the book, I do still think of him as "ah-kill-ees" in my mind. Perhaps it's part of having grown up among English speakers?
Posts: 14 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I do, too. Although, I'm better at remembering the proper pronunciation now than, say, when I first read Ender's Shadow several years ago.
On another note, while CotM is my least favorite of the series, the role of Peter in the story works extremely well, picking up right where his original politically-minded self left off. It also doesn't hurt that OSC included a very nice self-reference at the pivitol point of the novel ("Think of the device as downward...The device is down. You're falling toward the device." CotM p. 329) that really helped to tie the whole series together. Ender's gone, but his aiua, and as such his ideas and soul are still alive.
Posts: 14 | Registered: Mar 2006
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You know, I've got the Achilles problem backward. When I was called upon in class a while back to read a section from our mythology book, I kept pronouncing it uh-sheel. No one else got it, unfortunately.
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The closest thing that comes to mind is when he teased her about her breast size.
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, about each nation's history and culture and how it might evolve.
