Ender's Game:
I really enjoyed this book. We kind of all discussed it a little when we were together over Christmas break. Sherma and I talked about some of the interesting similarities we found with Hunger Games. Little kids being trained in war. Game VS. reality. When Bonzo dies in the fight in the bathroom it's a reminder that these "games" have real consequences. Both books explore how far humans will go, what boundaries will they cross in these strange futuristic scenarios. I've also recently read Brave New World and the Uglies, same themes there. Also the children who morph into wolf creatures? Weird. As most of you know this happens at the end of the first hunger games book. Katniss is on the cornucopia and all the tributes come back as wolf creatures. And in Ender's game it happens on the playground in the video game, and he has to kill them to move on. I thought that whole video game part was very interesting, it never quite explained it all the way so you were left pondering that. With all the war that went on, the other side (the buggers) were quite peaceful and in the end, Ender....who ended everything...wanted to preserve their story in the book. In both books I also saw the consequences of war on young people. Ender and Katniss were both seriously emotionally affected by what they experienced.
The Wednesday Letters
I don't have much to say, it was a nice and easy read. I liked how the adult children saw their parents in a different light after reading the letters and really being allowed into their mom and dad's marriage. They saw parts of their relationship that they never picked up on as kids. I thought it was fairly predictable, except I was surprised that Malcom's biological father was the priest. I thought it was going to be the uncle Joe. The uncle seemed like he carried such burdens of guilt and you know that he had some serious issues. And the dad always insisted on caring for him, I thought it was going to be him.
Thank you for the invitation to write on other things because I just read and loved:
The Glass Castle
It's a real story and it's about one of the craziest memoirs you will read. This women's parents are unreal. They have major issues and the whole story is about how resilient the kids are in such a terrible family situation. They learn to feed and care for themselves at very young ages. It starts out when the author is young and she writes about her parents like they are wonderful and life is just one big fun adventure. Just like most kids, she doesn't see her parents flaws. And as she grows up you see that she begins to realize how dysfunctional her parents are and she begins to learn some clues about how they got to be that way. I liked how the author used that perspective in her writing as the story went along, as she is growing up in the story. By the end you see how the same family situation affects different siblings differently. Like the author grew up to be successful and to write this book, while her younger sister emerged from that experience with serious problems herself and ended up living on drugs to deal with everything that happened to her.
The book hooks you from the start. The first sentence is something like "My earliest memory is being engulfed in flames" and the second chapter talks about how she is driving through New York in a cab, she's all dressed up on her way to a charity event. The cab stops at a red right and she sees a homeless person digging through a trash dumpster. She looks closer and has the realization that it's her own mother. She tells the cab driver to keep going, and the chapter ends. Very intriguing. I want Nathan to read it sometime with all that he's studying at school. It has a lot of hard to read adult things in it, but with that caution I do recommend it.
