If you haven’t read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card yet, then do so. It is an excellent book, and perhaps the one science fiction book with the broadest appeal of any that I know. When I first read it, I did so straight through–started on a Friday afternoon, did not finish until Saturday afternoon, no sleep in between.

I personally like the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, almost as much, though many people I know have less enthusiasm for it. However, you might want to stay away from Xenocide and Children of the Mind, the third and fourth novels in the series; although there have interesting characters and concepts, the quality of the story and one’s ability to suspend disbelief take serious blows. Somewhat better, though still not as magnificent as that first novel, are the “Shadow” series of books, focusing on the character of Bean from Ender’s Game; the first novel, Ender’s Shadow, takes place concurrent with the original novel, but from the perspective of a different character. The following novels, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets, continue the (still unfinished) story.

If I had to choose a second-best book by Card, it would have to be Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. An excellent read, well-researched historically. It regards a group of historians in the future who possess machines capable of viewing events in the past. The novel has many extremely interesting and sympathetic characters, and has at least two startling plot twists. One thing about Orson Scott Card, you know that any story he writes will at least be good. He has an incredible talent for describing his characters’ thought processes, why they do things, what their motivations are. His greatest weakness in characters is a recurring theme in several novels of an abusive older brother whom the main character lets walk all over him; aside from that, it is hard to ever criticize his fiction writing. His non-fiction journaling can be found at his web site Hatrack.com; I find his movie reviews to be quite good, though I personally cannot sympathize with his political views (he is somewhat of a knee-jerk conservative).

What I’m reading now: Phantoms in the Brain, by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, an excellent study of the workings of the human brain. The book examines the functioning of our minds primarily through patients with injuries or forms of brain damage that highlight how the brain processes information. A few examples are a variety of phantom limb sensations and the brain’s methods of ‘filling in’ blind spots in one’s field of vision. So far up to page 125, and it’s holding up very well.