Booky Ooky!

Speaker for the Dead / Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, 1994 (paperback) [orig. 1986]

My reading of Speaker of the Dead was inspired by the highest recommendation of a trusted source. I was reticent to do this review because there’s a lot involved in this book, so I’ve put it off for a full two weeks, and now it’s not even fresh in my mind. Fabulous. A+ for dealing with problems. Anyway, today Chris (Trusted Source) finished a novel, so I said to myself, “Listen! If he can write an entire book, you can write one lousy blog entry! Also, order Chinese for dinner! I feel like dumplings.”

So I’m here to contend with the many facets of this book, which I think are perhaps too numerous. I will begin by saying I really really liked Speaker for the Dead, which was a pleasant surprise. Ender’s Game, the prequel, was entertaining, but not mind-blowing, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Speaker was far more mature a piece, and I had trouble putting it down, a problem that led to lack of sleep, lateness to work, and ignoring important phone calls from loved ones. I did not, however, love all the book. The first three quarters were fantastic; the last quarter kind of lost me.

The novel is about a lot of things, but mostly it is about a community of settlers living on a planet they share with these sentient, primitive aliens they called pequeninos. (Incidentally, my ignorance of Portuguese phonetics was a great detriment in reading this novel.) The purpose of the settlement is basically to study these creatures since they’re the first sentient alien life ever discovered besides the bug things from Ender’s Game, which are now extinct. It’s been about 3,000 years.

So, they’ve got their quiet little religious settlement, and all’s well in the world until the peaceful alien society kills the man who’s been researching their behavior. Ummmmmm…. crap.

Enter Ender, Speaker for the Dead, summoned to “speak” the death of the xenologist (kind of like an alien anthropologist). Speaking a death is rather like eulogizing, but instead of blindly praising the dead, a Speaker will give a completely candid account of the person’s life: good, bad, and ugly all right there on the table.

So, relativity being what it is, it takes Ender 20-something years to reach the planet, by which time other people have died and there’s this whole big to-do about an unhappy family and their recently deceased (jerkface) patriarch. Ender ends up speaking the death of this despicable man. This and everything leading up to it was absolutely fantastic novel-writing. Card has this great sense of character and relationships and the human psyche that enthralled me. Ender’s Speaking was one of the most emotionally satisfying scenes I’ve ever read in anything. Card captured the flaws and graces of the man, his family, and his society and shoved them in your face saying “I’m writing about some crazy science fiction world, and we were having a good time pretending before, but this is real. This is your father or your neighbor or yourself, and it’s going on now in your world.”

The characters in Speaker for the Dead are dynamic and visceral. They’re in a fantastic situation, but this never feels like a foreign planet. It’s just people. I highly recommend this book for everything leading up to Ender’s big Speaking. When I got past this part, I knew there was a lot of book left, but I assumed it was going to lead up to another Speaking, since one was requested earlier on. That’s when the novel took a strange turn.

The remainder of the story is about the pequeninos, their freaky biology, and how their society functions. There’s big drama involving a rebellion, hatching a new alien species, and forming a new society. This is all great sci-fi fare, and I know Card could have done so much with it, but with the human-centered story leading up to it, it felt rather jarring to have such a dramatic shift. The ending of the book is about learning to understand a very inhuman society. It’s message comes through clear enough, but I just didn’t care about the pequeninos like I did about the humans. I felt cold to them and never felt such revelatory writing as I did in the first major part of the book.

Ultimately, Speaker for the Dead is about learning to observe and the foil of interpreting others’ experiences through the lens of your own. During the Speaking, this civilization became aware that what they saw, what they knew, and what actually was were distinctly different things. The had radically misjudged the lives of those they called friends and family. It was a powerful message. The pequeninos’ story contributes to this theme with all the misconceptions the xenologists had of the alien society as a result of great logical leaps they took based on the human experience. I understand how the ending quarter of the book fits together with the rest, and I appreciate Card’s intentions. I also think, however, that as a novel meant to speak to our human sensibilities, the pequeninos’s story weakened the intense impact this book may have otherwise had.

Ok, I’m back. I was out of town and then back and then out and then back and then lazy. The best part about traveling for me is that it’s very book-centric. All that airport downtime, the plane downtime, the sitting at home downtime. This couple of trips was even better because I discovered Half-Price Books and the magic thereof.

So, as it goes, since there was so much, you’re just getting a digest version because I’m tired and the idea of covering all I was thinking of covering makes me feel small and heavy.

Half-Price Books

This place is fierce. I was in the one in Dallas, and it’s the most ginormous establishment since the creation of the universe. They’ve got everything, and it’s cheap, but in really good shape. I got 11 books for $43. Can you even believe it? I was going to do a nice bookpile picture of them all, but it would seem I already filed them into my collection and to pull them seems like a chore. Tired, remember?

Ugh, fine, I will, stop whining.

Pleased? They are as follows:

• The Hundred and One Dalmations / Dodie Smith — I stumbled upon this and am now aware that I was the only person on earth who didn’t know this was a book first.
• Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf — I want to read The Hours soon, so this was my prerequisite. I read it. Super good.
• The Final Solution / Michael Chabon — If you haven’t read this man, you haven’t lived. Like-new, hardcover edition, and I got it for next to nothing.
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Stories / Edgar Allen Poe — I bought this for ‘Ligeia,’ which is the basis of one of my favorite modern operas, but the man’s pretty fierce, so I’m glad to have other things of his.
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Oliver W. Sacks — I thought the cover was yellowed from age. Turns out, it’s supposed to look like that.
• Confessions of a Pagan Nun / Kate Horsley — Another stumble upon. Neat cover + paganism + Ursula K. LeGuin endorsement = can’t really pass this up.
• Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro — Not pictured because I can’t find where I put it, making me the worst librarian ever. And that’s officially.
• Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival / Bernd Heinrich — You’ll soon notice that I like pop science books about fluffy animals.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell / Susanna Clarke — Every last one of you loves this book. I feel like I’m rejected from this secret society for not having read it yet. Being fatter than my Manhattan phone directory, it scared me off for a while, but at these prices, I knew it was time.
• Gulliver’s Travels / Jonathan Swift — I’ve never felt compelled to read this, but it was a dollar.
• Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences / Ursula K. LeGuin — It’s rare for me to find a book by LeGuin that I’ve never heard of, so I had to pick it up. You can tell it’s obscure because the Amazon page doesn’t even have cover art, I mean what’s that all about?
• Rent Boys: The World of Male Sex Trade Workers / Michel Dorais — Ok, I didn’t get this one at HPB, I got it at a gay bookstore, but I put it in the picture to take the place of the Ishiguro. I’ve wanted to read it ever since I sent a copy to the bindery in grad school (as was my job.)

Aaaand, a quick glance to my left has revealed the location of the Ishiguro, snuggled firmly between Mary Shelley and Murasaki Shikibu. Apparently I failed to notice the first letter of his name, which is strange because it’s both my favorite vowel and favorite word.

Anyway, I also read a few things. Brief rundown:

• The Tombs of Atuan / Ursula K. LeGuin — She’s getting a lot of attention today. I’ve read the Earthsea cycle before, and I’m slowly doing it again. A Wizard of Earthsea I reread a few months back, but this is probably my favorite from the initial four in the series. There’s something about LeGuin’s style here that suggests her reverence and respect for the world she’s set up, and that provides a really unique sensation when you’re going through this book. (One might suggest it’s the religious themes in the story, but I think it goes beyond that. I’m not so easily fooled, thanks.) Anyway, I appreciated it more this time than the first time, and now I think this is one of my all-time favorite books. Although for a different crowd, this is just as mature and illuminating as The Dispossessed, which I also heartily recommend.
• The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites / Terry Pratchett — As promised, I gave him another shot, and I’m already satisfied with the improvement. I read them both while languishing bloodshot and sore through a cumulative 7 hours of flight delays, so I don’t have much substantial to say except that I loved Equal Rites because, and this is kind of funny with what I just talked about, it’s such a fun parody of LeGuin’s Earthsea books. Parody’s maybe not the right word because this Rites was decidedly less stupid and silly than the previous two, as though Pratchett realized he could keep the charm and appeal strong while telling a worthwhile story.
• The Great Snape Debate / Amy Berner, Joyce Millman, Orson Scott Card — This was pretty good. The Card essay was probably the best part, but I’m not going to say anything else because, during a monumental nerd episode, I decided I’m going to do a thing pretty soon all about the pre-Deathly-Hallows analyses I’ve read. You’re excited.
• Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf — NOT a good airport read, but I did it anyway. This book is lovely and dense and it kind of made me feel bad about enjoying shallowness. You should read it. My favorite character was Mr. Dalloway, and the only way I can explain it is “I felt an affinity with him.” I don’t know why, we’re nothing the same.
• Peter Pan in Scarlet / Geraldine McCaughrean — The authorized sequel to Peter Pan. Pretty ok, but I did it for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, so a full review will be gracing your computer screens presently.

Ok, this was supposed to take me 10 minutes, and so far it’s been 1,000 hours. I’m cutting it short. Shorter. Yeah, I had more to say, even for a digest. Get over it and just be happy I’m back even though I know it’s hard to miss something that never really began (unless of course it happens to be uniquely special Joss Whedon space western that never got its due, but that’s neither here nor there.) Bye! Everyone go on vacation and buy a million books for the price of one, you won’t regret it!