Reading
There's something about having a stressful job and numerous duties that makes reading books (and I mean to emphasize the books, not so much the reading) a very difficult endeavor to begin. I have seen my dad, once a great and prolific reader, reduced to one book every few months for a long stretch of time while the kids were young and the work was hard. Thankfully, I still have friends who do not yet have these awful jobs, and thus still have time for reading. I believe I even owe a few of you (okay, all of you, I get it) books I was supposed to read and never quite got around to it.
Since I've been trying to learn from my parents' mistakes, you'd think that I would have kept reading. Unfortunately, the apple lands not far from the tree and I even seem to have missed the top of someone's head, for good measure. I've fallen into the same trap that befell my own parents, and I've barely read anything fiction in years.
There's something special about returning to the scene of a crime, or a series you read as a child. I'm lucky in that one of the formative series' of my childhood, the Ender's Game series, was written by someone who was a skilled author when I was young, and he has kept adding to the series while improving his skill in his craft. This cannot be said for all of my childhood reads; we won't discuss my preteen attraction to Terry Brooks.
What's valuable about a series that has continued to be high quality since your childhood is that you never feel like as if you're revisiting that same childhood. When I reread Ender's Game, part of me is pulled back to what it felt like to read the book the first time. There are, of course, the details that you have missed, and the hidden meanings that you didn't understand the first time through, but it's all layered onto the experience you've already had like icing on a cake. And just like the icing on the cake, it doesn't last as long as you think it should.
A new book, however, clears your plate and gives you the chance to digest something new, that speaks to the old in a way that you may not have understood if you had simply had the same meal with a different garnish. It is too easy to overanalyze the details of a book you have already read, in an attempt to justify the meaning you have already teased out of it; I remember discussions I have had in the comments section of eponis's post on the matter, and in hindsight my positions were not an attempt, so much, to invalidate the interpretation that she was expounding so much as an attempt to validate the interpretation that I had. The essence of a book is in how a reader reacts to it; for my part, I know that once I have read a book, the book ceases to exist as text and begins life as an impression, or a series of life lessons. Or jokes. A new book allows you to try to understand these new interpretations; I found it much easier to understand eponis's thoughts on Ender's Game by reading Ender in Exile than I ever would have by reading the novel we were actually talking about.
But reading a new book also allows you to contrast with the old--I hadn't realized how much of my sense of humor I draw from Card's style, that context-ignoring wordplay many of his characters supply. It's easier to see how I would have wanted a sense of control as a kid, knowing I was intelligent and hoping that if only I were in Ender's situation, I would have performed almost as well. (It doesn't occur to children that Sherlock Holmes has done a disservice to fictional depictions of deduction for centuries, and many fictional geniuses--when made real--would be just as clueless as the rest of us.)
So thank you, Dave, for taking a Christmas present I gave you and promptly going all fanboy over it, and then promptly lending it back to me to read so that I am forced to return the book to you, read, so that I can fanboy with you. Because I love the series and I would probably not be willing to just return it with the excuse of, "I don't have time to read."
Since I've been trying to learn from my parents' mistakes, you'd think that I would have kept reading. Unfortunately, the apple lands not far from the tree and I even seem to have missed the top of someone's head, for good measure. I've fallen into the same trap that befell my own parents, and I've barely read anything fiction in years.
There's something special about returning to the scene of a crime, or a series you read as a child. I'm lucky in that one of the formative series' of my childhood, the Ender's Game series, was written by someone who was a skilled author when I was young, and he has kept adding to the series while improving his skill in his craft. This cannot be said for all of my childhood reads; we won't discuss my preteen attraction to Terry Brooks.
What's valuable about a series that has continued to be high quality since your childhood is that you never feel like as if you're revisiting that same childhood. When I reread Ender's Game, part of me is pulled back to what it felt like to read the book the first time. There are, of course, the details that you have missed, and the hidden meanings that you didn't understand the first time through, but it's all layered onto the experience you've already had like icing on a cake. And just like the icing on the cake, it doesn't last as long as you think it should.
A new book, however, clears your plate and gives you the chance to digest something new, that speaks to the old in a way that you may not have understood if you had simply had the same meal with a different garnish. It is too easy to overanalyze the details of a book you have already read, in an attempt to justify the meaning you have already teased out of it; I remember discussions I have had in the comments section of eponis's post on the matter, and in hindsight my positions were not an attempt, so much, to invalidate the interpretation that she was expounding so much as an attempt to validate the interpretation that I had. The essence of a book is in how a reader reacts to it; for my part, I know that once I have read a book, the book ceases to exist as text and begins life as an impression, or a series of life lessons. Or jokes. A new book allows you to try to understand these new interpretations; I found it much easier to understand eponis's thoughts on Ender's Game by reading Ender in Exile than I ever would have by reading the novel we were actually talking about.
But reading a new book also allows you to contrast with the old--I hadn't realized how much of my sense of humor I draw from Card's style, that context-ignoring wordplay many of his characters supply. It's easier to see how I would have wanted a sense of control as a kid, knowing I was intelligent and hoping that if only I were in Ender's situation, I would have performed almost as well. (It doesn't occur to children that Sherlock Holmes has done a disservice to fictional depictions of deduction for centuries, and many fictional geniuses--when made real--would be just as clueless as the rest of us.)
So thank you, Dave, for taking a Christmas present I gave you and promptly going all fanboy over it, and then promptly lending it back to me to read so that I am forced to return the book to you, read, so that I can fanboy with you. Because I love the series and I would probably not be willing to just return it with the excuse of, "I don't have time to read."