Finished reading Speaker for the Dead. Here’s my review:
Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead
3stars
This cover has absolutely no relevance to the pages inside. Aside from the title.
Lacking the simplicity of Ender’s Game, in both story and style, Speaker for the Dead tells the continuing story of Ender, Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead. Much of the story interests me, particularly pieces dealing with the “piggies” and the other space shit. What does not much interest me are the blabberings of ‘truth,’ religion, and the ceaseless emotional exploration of characters that I have little to no invested interest in. The fact that this story takes place on a Portuguese speaking Catholic planet also doesn’t help much, I find the interspersing of Portuguese bits more obnoxious than flavorful and I still couldn’t name the characters to save my life. There is even a section before the story starts entitled: “Pronouncing Foreign Names,” which nearly got me to throw the book out. I felt that the strength of Ender’s Game was in its simplicity and here Card has filled his story with names I find unpronounceable belonging to characters that could have made the story stronger through retroactive birth control.
It’s a good book, but didn’t live up to the back cover:
“Less brash than Ender’s Game, SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD may be a much better book. Don’t miss it!” —Analog
“The most powerful work Card has produced. SPEAKER not only completes Ender’s Game, it transcends it.”* —Fantasy Review
*personal note: this statement is patently false.
Next book: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Personal Inventory:
Mostly I wake up grumpy but now with shorter days the lack of sunlight makes me sad in the mornings (evenings) but Joe and Carlye got me sunshine pills that seem to actually work for mood, at least placebicly.
I got some watercolors so I can paint with very little clean up, but it turns out night scenes are extremely difficult to convey with the medium.
Thoughts on The Walking Dead:
(HERE THERE BE SPOILERS to s02e02)
Firstly I must confess that Game of Thrones has ruined television for me, aside from Glee and Work of Art it’s pretty hard for me to watch anything new. The Walking Dead’s first season ended with one of the worst explosions I have seen on a non-SyFy channel movie, the characters in the show generally make pretty poor decisions based on their situations, and if I could go into tv land I would immediately vote off that old guy in the RV. Regardless of my hang-ups with the show I continue watching out of my fascination with the idea of zombies and what they mean culturally, I hope each time I sit down to watch the show they’ll have some great social statement epiphany for me. I’m slowly losing hope.
But I wait, wait for some sort of sophomoric comment from the old RV guy like “I didn’t realize how much of a zombie I was before I had to start living for myself” or some equally shitty statement that would at least hint that someone is formulating some subversive message for me. I’ve always said zombies and nazis are the only people you never have to feel bad about killing, and zombie nazis of course you have to go out of your way to kill. This is an interesting topic in itself, that we’ve made a safe place in our minds free of criticism where we can murder shit. Though unlike the mental nazis, zombies are victims, an even more disturbing thought, we’ve created a mental image of an unhealthy victim of disease and physical abuse who we now can kill without mercy.
Anyways: at the end of the first episode of this second season the obnoxious and surprisingly useless son gets shot in the chest, which honestly elated me since the only previous tension within that family was that the wife slept around. Let me just say that no one will give a fuck about adultery when there are zombies roaming the planet, so really this had been a non-issue they’ve been following for more than a season. I was hoping that the son getting shot in the chest would switch some stuff up and was looking forward to the husband and wife’s major loveless fallout, but as becomes apparent in episode 2 their son is invincible. I’m not an expert by any means but I get the feeling we have the term “lung shot” because it’s generally bad, though for this kid it seems mostly just painful and he’ll probably pull through regardless of getting appropriate medical attention for his usually fatal wound.
Basically there was no need for episode two, this show wastes more time than Dragon Ball Z.
My lunches of the past week and a half:
(sandwich)
Bologna
Marbled Bologna like meat
Lettuce
Swiss cheese
Pickle
Bacon
Mustard
Tomato
I weave the bacon with pickles into a mat that I place on top of all the other ingredients, I think it actually makes it taste better, and nothing slides out.
Thoughts:
What if my finger hairs grew so thick and long that it became difficult to type?
What would vampires think about boners?
I want to be buried above ground, naked.
