A Very Merry Christmas Dinner

Course One: Spinach Salade

This one I came up with myself. Ingredients included fresh spinach leaves, sliced radishes, sliced carrots, craisins, sliced almonds, and Italian cheese. I topped it with a very thin coat of dressing made from olive oil, apple cider vinegar, dried basil, black pepper, and minced garlic. Yum.



The Main Course

The main course consisted of Roasted Muscovy Duck, puree of curried lentils, and fresh green beans. I was really stressed about the duck, having never made one or even tasted it before. I started out planning to use Julia Child's instructions in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but I found some instructions on the duck's packaging that seemed easier and better. They had the seasonings and stuff all right, but their timing was off. It took about three times as long to cook it than what they said. Oh, well. It was a good duck. People say duck is really gamey, but I thought it was fine. In fact, I think it tastes better than turkey, and even most chicken.

I accidentally overcooked the green beans, and that was a very big disappointment for me, because if there's anything I hate, it's overcooked vegetables. I got busy disemboweling a pomegranate, and I didn't realize the beans would cook so fast in water that had yet to achieve a rolling boil. I guess rolling boil just isn't possible in a kettle as big as the one I was using. In the end, it was okay, because Sis sprinkled swiss cheese over them, I popped them in the oven for a few more minutes, and they were great. According to her, they were the greatest green beans she's ever tasted. I'm not going to assume that just because there are lots left over people didn't like them—there was SO MUCH food, and three pounds of green beans is just not going to be finished off.

The lentils were an interesting experiment. It was suggested to serve lentils with the duck, but my cookbook didn't have a recipe for them. So, I surfed the internet a little, then made one up. My family liked them, because they like curry and garlic. I guess they weren't pretty enough to be included in any photos.


Course Three: Vichyssoise

This dish was particularly exciting for me for several reasons. One, I just love potatoes. Two, I love to say the name of it—"Vichyssoise" has such a brilliant ring to it. Three, I tried it many years ago at some stranger's house, and it was just so good. My version was nothing like the other one. I am told it tasted more like gravy than soup. But it was good. I'm looking forward to the leftovers. It is made from potatoes and leeks and served cold.


Course Four: Fruit

The most aesthetic portion of dinner was the fruit. Fruit is so pretty anyway, isn't it? Preparing the pomegranate was fun, but next time I will give myself longer to get it done.









Course Five: Lemon Tart

Again, I am either a little dim or some cookbooks just aren't very good. We had so much trouble figuring out how to make the sugar crust that I handed it over to Sis. She did a great job, but she was confused the entire time. We chilled it overnight, and I was done trying to follow the recipe in the book. So I dug through some more cookbooks and decided what to mix together that would make a good lemon tart.

Let's just say that tart is an apt description of the dessert. Next time I think I'll try to get the lemon peel finer.





Highlights:


Getting so excited to cook!

Mom got to watch John Wayne movies while I was in the kitchen.

Grandpa said "My compliments to the chef."

Pretty much everyone asked for a second piece of tart.

Conversations With Myself

Mile 1: I wore these shorts because they used to be skin tight. Why are they falling off?

Mile 2: Wow, I remember the days when I wasn't a walking snot factory. I think I'll have some more Strawberry Halls when I get home.

Mile 3: Slumdog Millionnaire is pretty cool.

Mile 4: I wonder how much longer this basketball game is going to last. At least it isn't a smutty sitcom.

Mile 5: Nothing like techno synthesized violins mixed with electric guitar. I'm sure they heard music like this all the time in the 12th Century.

Mile 6: I'm still breathing. This is good.

Mile 7: I need a dragon!!!!!

Mile 8: Maybe a breast reduction isn't a bad idea.

Mile 9: The dude next to me is running really fast. After I run a marathon, I think I'll practice running really fast. It looks fun.

Mile 10: Wait a second. Oh, they start the time over after you've been running 100 minutes.

Mile 11: Surviving.

Mile 13: I could slow down. No, that'll just mean I have to run more minutes.

Mile 14: I'm awesome.

Mile 15: Time to hobble over to the water fountain. That was fun.

My Booktrailer for Everlost

I made this for a class. You can tell I'm into melodrama.

On Writing

Maria Montessori's methods stood heavily on the idea that writing comes before reading. Her little schools were made famous by the "writing explosion" that took place among the four-year-olds as they spontaneously began writing words on all the surfaces they could find. She started by teaching them their letters, but they taught themselves to put them together to make written words. Before they had even seen a book. Not only that, but within a few months of learning to put letters together and make words, they could put words together and write epistles. By themselves. A group of four-year-olds whose parents were mostly factory workers.

This is completely opposite to the approach taken in most schools. In kindergarten, kids are taught their letters and how to write their names, but the first goal is to introduce them to books.

It may sound strange that an obsessive lover of books such as myself might advocate against their use, but I think Montessori had an important idea. Not only does it operate on the assumption that tactile activities promote more thorough learning, but words mean the most when we use them to communicate with others, not when we use them to understand others.

People, especially children, are the center of their own universe. Why would a kid want to learn to read someone else's thoughts before learning how to write his/her own? Some people say it's because it's easier, and therefore comes as a step in a natural progression. But according to Montessori, children don't think of the world in terms of what is easy and what is hard. That is something that they learn later—in my opinion, later is whenever they begin to rank pop culture above their own intellect. In other words, I think laziness of any form is something we learn, not something we unlearn.

Maybe it's a good thing I don't have kids, because I would always be testing unconventional, experimental methods of education with them. I do that with cooking, too, but there's a big difference between a child's mind and a dinner dish. And even though most experimental cooking comes out rather nice, there's no guarantee that a kid wouldn't be warped by someone who used educational methods and theories that are not part of the established canon of "research based, data-driven" packages that vendors love to sell to traditional schools.

One Hundred Books

Lest I sound too impressed with myself, I will explain that the purpose of posting this isn't to brag about how many books I read, but to summarize a year's worth of one of my favorite hobbies. That's all my blog is about anyway—to provide an outlet for discussing the things I like to do. It's pretty egocentric, I guess. Maybe I should delete my blog again. But before I think too hard about that, I'll post my list.

It's time to evaluate the usefulness of my year, and even though reading books has only been a part of what I have done, I tend to evaluate a lot of things based on what I'm reading at the time. Some, well, quite a few if truth be told, of the books on the list below were a waste of time. I don't want to say which ones, because you never know who might come across your blog and take offense. And anyway, every book on the list was completed for a reason, at least. There are even more books that didn't make the list because I couldn't stand to read them all the way through.

Some of them were just plain comfort books. My Grandpa likes to refer to them as "intellectual chewing gum," and I've also heard the term "brain candy." An unfortunate truth I've had to accept is that sometimes I feel the need to read something to simulate positive emotions. It's not unlike going on a sugar binge, and because I'm doing physical sugar binges less and less lately, I think the amount of intellectual sugar binges might have increased (Is it a stupid thing to say that in my experience, successful efforts to become thinner are making me dumb?). But most of them were time well spent. I bolded the ones that meant the most to me, but once you start doing that, nothing fits into a category anymore.

So there, you have it. The 100 books I read in 2010. I didn't include the huge stack of picture books I lugged around in my library bag for a week, because I turned them all in before I committed their titles to memory.

And I'm not finished reading yet. I've still got 15 days.


1. The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
2. Max, James Patterson
3. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
4. Evermore, Alyson Noel
5. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
6. The Alchemist, Paul Coelho
7. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares
8. The Whale Rider
9. Chalice, Robin McKinley
10. Song of the Sparrow, Lisa Ann Sandell
11. Sister of My Heart, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
12. Freckle Juice, Judy Blume
13. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
14. Catalyst, Laurie Halse Andersen
15. Among the Impostors, Margaret Peterson Haddix
16. Among the Betrayed
17. Among the Barons
18. Among the Enemy
19. Among the Brave
20. Hush, Hush, Becca Fitzpatrick
21. Among the Free, Margaret Peterson Haddix
22. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson
23. Daughter of the Forest, Juliet Marillier
24. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
25. Palace of Mirrors, Margaret Peterson Haddix
26. Incantation, Alice Hoffman
27. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
28. Lady Macbeth's Daughter, Lisa Klein
29. Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
30. Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card
31. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
32. The Waves, Virginia Woolf
33. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman
34. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
35. The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
36. Airborn, Kenneth Oppel
37. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
38. Agamemnon, Aeschylus
39. Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
40. Antigone, Sophocles
41. The Wall and the Wing, Laura Ruby
42. Grendel, John Gardner
43. Is Literacy Enough?, Ross
44. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
45. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
46. Childhood Education, Maria Montessori
47. The Absorbent Mind
48. The Montessori Method
49. Montessori Today: A Comprehensive Approach, Paula Polk Lillard
50. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
51. Early Literacy Storytimes @ Your Library, Ghoting and Martin-Diaz
52. Fundamentals of Children's Services, Michael Sullivan
53. Readicide, Kelly Gallagher
54. After Ever After, Jordan Sonnenblick
55. Watership Down, Richard Adams
56. Animal Farm, George Orwell
57. The Night Fairy, Laura Amy Schlitz
58. Al Capone Shines My Shoes, Gennifer Choldenko
59. Rubaiyat, Omar Khayaam
60. Distant Waves, Suzanne Weyn
61. Everlost, Neal Shusterman
62. The Ninth: Beethoven and the World of 1824, Harvey Sachs
63. The Compound, S.A. Bodeen
64. A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb
65. The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman
66. Xenocide, Orson Scott Card
67. Children of the Mind
68. I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, Ally Carter
69. Shadow of the Hegemon, Orson Scott Card
70. Shadow Puppets
71. Shadow of the Giant
72. Ender in Exile

Re-reads:
73. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
74, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
75. Crown Duel, Sherwood Smith
76. Persuasion, Jane Austen
77. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
78. Avalon High, Meg Cabot
79. Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
80. Tregaron's Daughter, Madeleine Brent
81. A Murder For Her Majesty, Beth Hilgartner
82. Rose Daughter, Robin McKinley
83. The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
84. The Outlaws of Sherwood, Robin McKinley
85. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
86. The Only Alien on the Planet, Kristen Randle
87. Tangerine, Edward Bloor
88. The Wednesday Wars, Gary Schmidt
89. Speak, Laurie Halse Andersen
90. Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie, Jordan Sonnenblick
91. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
92. The Aeneid, Virgil
93. Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
94. The Girl With the Silver Eyes, Willo Davis Roberts
95. Anne's House of Dreams, L.M. Montgomery
96. Anne of Green Gables
97. Fairest, Gail Carson Levine
98. The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie
99. Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder
100. Ender's Shadow, Orson Scott Card

The Good Book Without Focus

In spite of my earlier assertions, curiosity overpowered my need for emotional recovery, so I finished reading Ender in Exile today. It was good, and that's about all that needs to be said.

Except that it's not all that needs to be said. That book was all over the place. It really should have been several books, or never written. Or a series of short stories. Or something. I don't know. I'm not the professional writer, and I'm glad Card wrote it. I did like it, a lot.

How can you call it a novel, though, when there were so many plot lines—all of which were a little bit weak—that were only weakly strung together?

It's true he needed to actually go into the part where Ender finds the Hive Queen cocoon. And he fabricated a new conflict with the Admiral of the ship that took him to Shakespeare. That was good, but it was too easy. And then there was that whole thing with Ender's letter to his mom and dad. I get it, and it was a beautiful letter, and it's the kind of thing I would have wanted to include in a book series if I could write one like this. But it's not the sort of thing you can just toss into a book and leave hanging like that.

The most disappointing part was the end, where the story was so truncated. Randall/Achilles/Arkanian and his vilifying of the Hegemon and Virlomi, and his creation of the label 'Xenocide' needed more time to develop. It's pretty obvious Card was leaving a thread there for a possible future book—the story of how Arkanian Delphiki tries to make up for all the lies he propagated and all the unrest and hatred and division he caused, all because he believed the insane ravings of the woman who raised him. In a way, it parallels the burdens Ender has on his shoulders.

It also ties in to the little subplot of Dorabella and Alessandra—how much are children affected by having crazy parents? So I guess it does loosely fit in with Ender's story, because he was so conflicted about his own mother and father.

I don't mean to be overly critical of the book, but it was somewhat disappointing, only because it's not as strong as the others. Now I wonder when the next one will be finished and published. I can't wait.

Bean Continued

I should have been prepared for the agony of Shadow of the Giant. But, stupid me, I forgot how I felt after I finished Ender's Game. Both times. This, if possible, is even worse. I'm so upset I can't really even write about it coherently, so I'm going to take a break and finish this post later. Or not at all.

****
That was a few hours ago, and I might be sufficiently collected by now. We'll see.

First of all, the whole series has thematic unity I really admire. The way the characters and situations shape themselves is so interesting.

Let's break this down. You start with a toddler whose intelligence is unlimited. He's so smart he broke the test, and he's going to keep getting smarter until he dies. Scary, a little? Well, nature intervened and also handicapped him. Just as there is no limit to his intellectual growth, there is no limit to his physical growth. You know from book one that his days are numbered. He'll die of giantism before he's 20 years old.

Not surprising that he ends up being instrumental in saving the world when he's only, what, five? But what happens next? A psycho maniac wants him dead, of course. All the psycho maniacs are after him in one way or another, but the one with the most charisma has the power, and he uses it. Bean spends a few years of his life on the run, but also figuring out how to rescue Petra, who happens to be the smartest and most aggressive girl on earth and is being held against her will by the same psycho that wants to kill Bean.

Bean, of course, succeeds in rescuing Petra, and then the inevitable happens. They fall in love. This is where the books take a serious departure from traditional sci-fi. You, as a reader, see the impossibility of this scenario, but you don't care. You want Petra to get what she wants—which is to marry Bean and have as many of his babies as possible.

Why? Because he's the smartest person who ever was, or ever will be, born. Who else's babies would she want to have?

But it's more than that. By this time, Bean has transformed out of his cold, calculating, I'm-even-smarter-and-more-ruthless-than-a-computer person and become someone startling. Oh, Bean. Oh, Julian Delphiki. We love you, and it only has a little bit to do with the fact that your days are numbered and you know it. And we weren't supposed to love you. We were supposed to fear you. But we realized that fearing you would make us enemies, so we trusted you instead—and the ultimate trust is love.

And he never asked for any of it. He was completely indifferent the entire time who loved him, who hated him, who thought they could one-up him, and who thought they could flatter themselves into his good books. Because Bean has no good books.

Meanwhile, the rest of the kids who saved the world with Ender and Bean are playing out a sick and twisted game for world dominance, against Peter Wiggin, a young man so full of his own snot that he thinks he can take over the world in spite of the fact that he was judged unfit for the battle school that made the others what they were. Or identified them for what they already were—walking weapons.

This is where it gets really complicated. Virlomi, the only woman in this whole game besides Petra, whose involvement becomes secondary after she gets pregnant with one of her and Bean's nine embryos, is abandoned in the south of India after Petra's rescue. Vir's goal? Save India from China, from Russia, and from the new united nation of Islam.

But who is in charge of these superpowers? Friends from Battle School. Vlad is in Russia, designing battle plans he's sure the Russian military will never use. Han Tsu gets himself declared emperor of China. And the Muslim nations have all united under their new Caliph Alai.

Vir's first victory is in successfully uniting India. She starts small, by piling stones in the roads and suggesting to the locals that everyone does it, has always done it, and that it is some mystical force that keeps India whole. The Wall of India. They come together as they never have before in all the history of the world, and as the unity spreads, so does her legend. She becomes a goddess, living with and for the people, and designing videos specifically meant to rip to pieces the public image of both the Chinese and the Muslims as benevolent conquerors.

But her game begins in earnest when Han Tsu tries to marry her and she realizes her value as a political piece. She topples Han Tsu's pieces, opting instead to go for Peter Wiggin, who is making great headway in creating a state known as the Free People of Earth. Peter sees that his goal isn't a merger between India and the Rest of the World, so that rejection sends her to the next person she thinks she can sway—Alai.

Vir plays dirty, and Alai falls for it both because he wants to and because he has to. Marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim throws everything off balance. It's the beginning of the end. All the other Battle School kids, one by one, realize that staying on earth will only cost millions of lives, and they leave as part of a space colonization project.

That part was particularly sad, because I really liked Vir. I especially liked the tragic twist that was created out of her own humility. She was really good at what she did—she was so good she couldn't believe her own success, and eventually ended up attributing it to powers beyond her own control, so she became a slave to fate, megalomania, and chance all at the same time. It broke her much worse than it broke any of the others.

Except Alai, maybe, because he was the one who seemed to be the most sincere in his desire to be a servant of God. He took his position believing that somehow he could lead the believers in a conquest to bring peace to the entire world through the acceptance of Islam, and he found himself betrayed by everyone—the people he led, the people who placed him in power, and worst of all, the wife that he loved. Alai's departure from earth was the one that, to me, reeked most of defeat.

In the end? What everyone knew would happen from the very beginning. Julian Delphiki's death is successfully faked, and he embarks on a relativistic voyage meant to prolong his life long enough for a mad scientist (the same one who "created" him) to come up with a cure for him and his three "handicapped" babies, leaving Petra with the five "normal" ones to live out a "normal" life. And ... Peter Wiggin wins everything. But you're happy about it, because he somehow grows on you, and you realize that he has something more important than charisma. He has an honest heart.

I understand that it's weird to review a book in this style. I've basically just given a summary with my own commentary. But that's what I do best.

My next question is, how does he come up with this stuff? I wonder if that would annoy him to know that I'm asking. But it's a valid question. I read somewhere that C.S. Lewis said that writing The Screwtape Letters was a rather torturous experience, because he had to put himself in an uncomfortable frame of mind, and in essence, be the devil. Being a writer is a thousand times more complex than being an actor, because you have to be your characters, while at the same time pulling dozens of invisible strings. How does one person handle all the emotions necessary to be all those people, when I can barely handle the emotion I feel from just reading about them?

I don't have the guts to read Ender in Exile yet. I need some recovery time first. Unfortunately, I thought I had outgrown whatever it is about me that leaves me feeling like I've been run through a blender after reading books of this type. Maybe it's something you never outgrow. It's probably a good thing for me that Shadows in Flight isn't going to be accessible for a while.

Bean

If I were a guy and could have any name I wanted, I would choose Julian Delphiki. It's the coolest name I ever heard. So cool that I keep repeating it to myself. Julian Delphiki. Julian Delphiki. Julian Delphiki. It sounds even better in conversation.

Yeah, I also think I'm really weird.

This book series is weirding me out, though. I like it a lot—no question about that. However, it is requiring too much suspension of disbelief. I don't quite understand why, because the Ender series was just as "out there" if not more. It probably has to do with the fact that usually there is no love in science fiction. Or, at best, it's hopeless, platonic, or fraternal. I can't get past the whole Petra and Bean are married thing. Or that Bean, who was introduced to me as an undersized genius orphan street rat who went to Battle School and helped save the world from an alien invasion, is now suddenly very tall, very married, and very paternal—and all he cares about is finding the embryos he and his wife created so that she can raise them by herself after he's dead. And all this before he's even sixteen. Don't tell me it isn't weird.

I haven't finished reading Shadow of the Giant yet, but yes, I skipped to the end. Everyone is always so shocked to find out that this is a regular practice of mine, but really, I don't know if I would ever make it through most books if I didn't. I just can't handle the suspense. I rarely read so much that it gives away the climax, but it does reassure me that certain characters make it to the last page. Ominous music is now playing in my head.

Children of the Mind

is my new favorite book!

And ...... spoiler alert.

I'm not opposed to weird, out-there speculation about how the universe works. Card's books are full of that. But what he doesn't do is take known laws of physics and toss them out the window. I just realized, really realized, how terribly horrible are the writers and producers of such series as Star Trek. This is probably the geekiest post I've ever written—but I just can't help but be completely appalled that in the new Star Trek film they claim that Spock was able to time travel because of a black hole. GAAAHH! Why? Why?

It's just as easy to come up with some far-out, esoteric reason it happened. Why just throw in something that obviously couldn't happen and rely on the dimness of viewers to either not notice or not care? I guess part of my frustration is that I'm embarrassed I didn't notice the first time I saw it how bad the science really was.

So now I'm becoming a science fiction geek. All because a few Christmases ago I decided it was about time I seriously tried to understand science, and not just the watered-down, random textbook version I got in school (I seriously doubt I ever had a science teacher who cared about science). My first step was to go to the library and check out a book by Stephen Hawking, whose name I remembered from watching my dad watch NOVA when I was a kid. Also, because I knew my own limitations in grasping big and significant ideas, I got the version with pictures. Thus, I read (and mostly even understood) The Illustrated Theory of Everything. Talk about life-changing experiences. I no longer see myself as incapable of understanding scientific thought—I just see myself as having wasted many chances in my youth to understand scientific thought. But better late than never.

Now I tend to get most of my science from discussions with my brother, reading biographies of prominent scientists, the occasional science documentary, and science fiction books.

Aside from the implausibility of what happens in Children of the Mind, including all the instantaneous space travel, the transference of souls in and out of both natural and synthetic bodies, and inter-special cohabitation, it never broke any known rules.

And get this—just as I was convincing myself that Card's strength was not in the beauty of his writing but the pull of his ideas, he wrote one of the most beautiful passages of prose I've ever read. I almost didn't want it to be over—the part where Jane "dies" because the computer network is shut down and the "space" she inhabits isn't there anymore. First she tries to take over Ender's bodies (weird), but they fight her back. So she goes inside the Hive Queen next, which is an interesting little interlude. Finally, she goes to the Pequenino Mothertrees, and by doing so fills them with sparkly lights and helps them grow and make blossoms and fruit. They don't resent her intrusion or her energy, because they have a greater capacity for that sort of thing. It was so joyful to read.

I also really liked just about every one of Wang-mu's inner thoughts, as well as all the things she said to people. I guess I'm still a sappy romantic, because I liked the love parts too—like where Peter was analyzing whether or not he was in love with Wang-mu, and all the stuff Miro feels about Val-Jane and what happens to her. Very sweet stuff.

The other thing is that I loved the Afterword. It's completely cool.

Now I'm out of things to say, with no sophisticated way of wrapping up my thoughts, but because this is a blog and not an English paper, I'll let it end with my favorite quote from the book.

Miro, after an intense inner battle about why he does/doesn't want Jane to take over the body of Val/Ender: "I want all bad things to go away and everybody to be happy. I want my mommy. What kind of childish dolt have I become?"

Xenocide

There are the fans, and there are the ones who haven't got around to reading his work. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't like Orson Scott Card's books. Well, the Ender books, anyway. I guess there are some weird, less famous ones that I've heard might be lame.

A while back, it's probably been almost ten years now, I read Ender's Game. It was an experience never to be forgotten. No other book I've ever come across has taken an idea and explored it in such a way, while at the same time creating a character I actually cared about, pretty much like I care about real people. Disturbing at multiple levels—most of which can't even surface until you've finished the book, put it aside, and utterly failed at forgetting it and moving on with your life—it stretched the boundaries of what I thought fiction books could really do and how much they actually can change you.

I've been changed by other books before, but not in such a self-aware way. The Little House on the Prairie books partially defined my childhood, L.M. Montgomery's books defined my adolescence, and Harry Potter helped pull me and keep me out of a very dark period of transition. Countless other books altered my perception of the world around me and the relationships I had formed and should form—most of them good, some of them bad. But I didn't think about it that way.

When I think about books that truly changed me, Ender's Game is always at the very top of the list. I should probably go more into why, but I don't want to, because it's a little too personal, and because I'd rather discuss Xenocide right now. For a long time, I had to recognize that I could only read a book by Card every few years or so, because when an intense personality reads an intense book, long periods of recovery time are required. So I read Ender's Game, then a few years later I read it again. A few years after that, I read Ender's Shadow, and a few years after that I read Speaker for the Dead. I got my copy of Xenocide on purpose to go to an author signing, but that, also, was a few years ago. I had to wait to start reading it when I was ready. And, contrary to my expectations, waiting a few years was not a bad thing; I could remember every character and every pertinent detail.

I just finished reading it this morning, only because last night I had a hundred pages left and was holding my eyes open with stinging tears just to get that far.

I'm sure most of my reaction to this book has to do with the fact that the author and I are members of the same faith, so I understand where his ideas are both coming from and traveling towards. But I haven't read any other books that attempt to explore and explain faith and religion with science—all at the same time throwing in dilemmas of ethics that span across planets, across villages, across religious orders, across different species, across members of the same family, and even within individuals.

What is the nature of life? Why do people care about each other? Why do people exist? How do people exist? What is free will? What is bondage? What is power? What is right? What is wrong? How much of reality is limited to our power of imagination?

He's asking the questions, and he's presenting evidence for the questions to be relevant along with evidence to provide answers. But he doesn't try to answer them.

Some authors are so open-ended you almost wish they had never brought up the questions in the first place. Others are a little too eager to wrap up their own conclusions in a box and present it to readers as if it were a great gift. A really great author leaves just enough alone. Like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, and giving multiple arguments for either one—and at the same time wondering how vital it really is whether we know or not.

What I'm saying, then, is that Card is a great author, aside from all the stylistic fumbles he has said are relatively unimportant. He believes in substance over style, and I do agree with the overall philosophy, though I'm not convinced he's entirely correct in his approach. The book would have been much stronger if he had tighter editing (I feel patronized as a reader when the author feels the need to tell me things more than once, especially how certain people are related to others; and I was informed at least six times that Ender was Miro's step-father), and even possibly if he could employ a little more verbal subtlety in characterization.

But what's the job of a critic? In the words of Anton Ego, "the average piece of junk is worth far more than our criticism designating it so." There's plenty of junk out there in the world of books, but Xenocide isn't part of that pile.