By William Kristoph

Thanks to a friend, I dove into Ender’s Game (and now Speaker for the Dead) a couple of weeks ago. They’re relatively quick reads and Ender’s Game, specifically, was a bunch of fun. Not too hard on the brain, but hard enough to make me go, “Hmm” plenty of times. In fact, it’s probably in my Top 5 favorite books. I thought I’d put some thoughts here for why it’s made my Top 5.

• I love to read Sci-Fi that is older, to see what guesses the author (in this case Orson Scott Card) got right or wrong. Card got a lot right back in 1977 and 1985, from the “desks” (iPads / tablets) to the “nets” (basically a version of blogs on the internet).
• I enjoyed Ender’s struggle with his aggression versus his desire to not use that aggression.
• The cast of characters had just the right amount of depth to them. I didn’t need to know everything about Ender’s buddies or family, but Card threw me enough information about each character to keep me from asking, “Why?” too often.
• Epic space battles.
• The end. I won’t specify in case someone reading this hasn’t read the book, but the ending surprised me. I thoroughly enjoy when I don’t see the end of a story long before I reach it. Ender’s Game didn’t disappoint me.