Orson Scott Card & Ender's Game

I can't think of many books that have kept me up till late at night, refusing to let me sleep until I know how the story ends. Rarely can multiple books by the same author also have that effect on me. It's also kinda annoying, being passively in thrall to someone else's narration, but that's the price you pay for being a book lover.

Examples of books that have refused to let me go and kept me up until I finished the story (all recommended, by the way):

The Harry Potter series
The Da Vinci Code
The Lost Symbol
Shadow of the Wind
The Angel's Game
The Book Thief
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Kite Runner
Cloud Atlas
Tales of the Otori series

A close friend recommended Ender's Game some time to me, and, as was my wont, I added it to the list on the side. But I didn't give it that much attention - after all, every item on my list is important, na? So I added it and left it, and picked off other stuff based on familiarity and guessing by the title.

Enter the author. I checked out an anthology of short fantasy stories from the library, mostly because some fictions by Neil Gaiman and Eoin Colfer were featured, and it was good. The final story, however, was a 100-page novelet by Orson Scott Card called Stonefather. It's hard to explain, but within the first few pages, I was gripped, as if I knew a master storyteller was telling his tale. It was 100-pages, but they flew by in no time, and I was left wanting more.

More I got. I checked out Ender's Game soon after that, and was totally blown away. I intended to get Speaker for the Dead soon after, but forgot, until about two months ago. This, too, was devoured late into the night. Followed soon by Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

Yes, it's sci-fi, but that actually matters very little in the grand scheme of things. It's like background. The Ender quartet is a moral tale set among the stars, and I am sure that few people in the world could have written what Card wanted to say. That I find it so fascinating right now, even though Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead were written in 1985 and 1986 is just astounding. Or indeed that the author states Ender's Game was only written so that he could tell the tale he really wanted to, which was Speaker of the Dead, and he had to hone his writing skill for 10 years before he could actually write it. Wow.

Just read them. I've finished the original quartet, and will be reading the "Shadow" series soon. I can't wait.