I was always a voracious reader but in reality I recycled the same 10 or 15 books a year with a few new ones sprinkled in for good measure. This isn’t a bad system but it would have made for a very repetitive Cannonball profile and one thing my CBR journey has pushed me to do in the past three and a half years is to read new books: different genres and entire author oeuvres etc. So now that I’m on my fourth year I figure […]
At least Graff gets a happy ending
Orson Scott Card wrote Ender in Exile eleventh out of the twelve books in the Enderverse (so far), but it actually falls between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and runs alongside the events of most of the Shadow Series. Card says he wrote it to fill in the gaps between the war ending on Eros, and Ender becoming the Speaker that we see in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. However, it seemed more to me like Card had a list of all the endings he needed […]
The Giant in the cargo bay
And so I’ve reached the (current) end of Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Series. Allegedly, he has another novel called Shadows Alive in the works — but no idea when that will be released. I enjoyed Shadows in Flight, but it definitely feels more like set up for the next book than a novel in its own right. “What I want,” he said softly, “is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun.” After the events of Shadow of the Hegemon, Bean and his three […]
He casts quite the shadow
So I was already a leeeetle behind on my reviews, then I went on a trip where I ended up spending about 12 cumulative hours in an airport or on a plane, and finished four more books. So now I’m really behind, and about to flood the main page in an effort to catch up. Apologies! First up: the audiobook I finished prior to leaving town. I’ve been working my way through Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Series, which focuses on the genetically-modified military commander, Bean, whose genes have granted […]
Yay for more Petra!
While I admit that I’m tiring slightly of the Enderverse audiobooks, which I’ve been listening to nonstop for the last couple of months in an attempt to visit stories that I haven’t read in years, as well as fill in any gaps where I’ve missed a book release (god this sentence is long), I must say that Shadow Puppets is one of the best novels in the series, and one that I remembered quite well, despite not having read it in at least seven or eight […]
Good story, terrible audio production
Orson Scott Card’s Shadow of the Hegemon continues the Bean-focused storyline from Ender’s Shadow, with a good focus on Peter Wiggin and Petra Arkanian as well. We have Achilles back as the bad guy, and Card does a much better job of fleshing him out this time around. “What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other […]