My response to Ender's Game upon a re-reading a few months ago, while not as strong as this reviewer's, were certainly not favorable.
I am a much more sociable, confident person than I was at age 11 or 12, when I first read Card's writing. Even without knowing as much as I do now about his particularly distateful (to me, at least) political and social views, it was pretty apparent that Card and I disagree on many critical ethical issues: eugenics, whether the "ends justify the means," and when (if ever) armed conflict is a noble activity.
However, the Ender's Game series (like Dune, Wizard of Earthsea, and other young adult Sci-Fi and fantasy I read as a child) still served a valuable role for me in that earlier, more difficult time in my social development. By providing role models that were not, in fact, the typical action hero, athlete, or rich businessman, they showed me a glimpse of a world (however unrealistic and disfunctional) in which a geek could get ahead.
For that (and for teaching the ever-valuable lesson of questioning the motives of even respected authority figures) I still owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Card and his menagerie of characters.
Try rereading stranger in a strange land or any other book you loved as a teen and it's not going to stand up to what you remember.
Anyway, the amount of open hostility displayed by children shapes how you view the world. As an adult you rarely feel you are surrounded by monsters, but most young people feel this way. I think this is why overt violence is so appealing to young people they live in it's shadow everyday and it becomes what you know.
I don't know about any teen book. I still love Diana Wynne Jones books for the same reason I loved it when I first read it: because of her ability to weave a very dense-but-accessible story out of a fascinating concept. I also still love Asimov and Herbert.
It depends on the sort of read it is. Ender's Game is a book that has an emotional impact on you when you first read it, but not a very intellectual one. Stories that base their punches on emotions without firm concepts don't hold up as well.
I just read his political views, and I guess this is why I never read about authors before reading their books. It's hard not to let personal differences in social views colour your perception of their work - which could be excellent when read without bias.
agree totally, likewise for music, I try hard to avoid any knowledge about artists I like life, it invariably colors there work in my mind.
I don't think it's possible to create something that is different without being a little unusual. Could anyone work a nine to five job be a good stable citizen and then come home and write a stephen king novel, or an enders game?
Phillip K Dick is an example that always springs to mind, he wrote so many books, and was diagnosed with mental disease. I have read a quote that aliens dictated his books to him, can't track it down now. Where would Hollywood be without an endless supply of phillip K. Dick novels?
Robin Williams has been diagnosed manic depressive, when he take his medication he is no longer funny he has said.
The idea that creativity is neatly pigeon holed without spilling over into the rest of your life, for good or bad, is just as nonensical as that review (I always thought the book was a standard teenage angst sort of thing).
Dick is a prime example, yeah. I don't like many of his works, they seem far too paranoid, but I find it sad that his mind as so twisted. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is brilliant on multiple levels, and it's one of the best pieces of literature from the last century.
Creativity can't be pigeonholed, and it's silly to ever assume that it can be. I agree. The fact that it can't be neatly sorted is what makes it creativity. (A teacher once told my classmates and I that CollegeBoard approached his top class to give them a set of multiple-choice "creativity" tests. What a sickening idea. Luckily, the idea was wholly scrapped because all of the top kids gave radically different answers.)
I am a much more sociable, confident person than I was at age 11 or 12, when I first read Card's writing. Even without knowing as much as I do now about his particularly distateful (to me, at least) political and social views, it was pretty apparent that Card and I disagree on many critical ethical issues: eugenics, whether the "ends justify the means," and when (if ever) armed conflict is a noble activity.
However, the Ender's Game series (like Dune, Wizard of Earthsea, and other young adult Sci-Fi and fantasy I read as a child) still served a valuable role for me in that earlier, more difficult time in my social development. By providing role models that were not, in fact, the typical action hero, athlete, or rich businessman, they showed me a glimpse of a world (however unrealistic and disfunctional) in which a geek could get ahead.
For that (and for teaching the ever-valuable lesson of questioning the motives of even respected authority figures) I still owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Card and his menagerie of characters.