Card

I used to have favorite books.  I even wrote my own Top Ten lists for books that I thought were meaningful, powerful, and grand in every sense of the word.

The problem was that the more books I read, the more this list tended to change.  And some books that I remembered being so meaningful to me at a certain time in my life didn’t hold up on re-reading.  I stopped concerning myself with favorite titles and began looking at the authors who consistently touched, entertained, or taught me more than others.

The list included such giants as C. S. Lewis, Jane Austen, Brandon Sanderson, Hugh Nibley, Stephen King, Robert Jordan, Bill Willingham, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London, William Shakespeare, Richard Adams and Ray Bradbury.

This past week, though, I’ve had to mentally kick myself.  There are two authors who have been with me longer than any of the rest of these but I always forget to mention them.  In fact, I’d forgotten about their impact on me entirely until now: Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton.

With Card, I cannot believe how little credit I’ve given him in the past year.  The fact is, he’s had an artistic presence over me since I was five.  My parents had purchased a VHS collection from Living Scriptures, an animation company that was making movies of many scripture stories from my church’s canon.  Card wrote the scripts for the first six Book of Mormon videos and a few of the exceptional New Testament videos.  Those were some of my favorite cartoons growing up and I had no idea that Card was behind it until I was well into high school.

By that time, I was a devoted follower of anything he wrote.  I started off with Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead (like the majority of his fans) when I was a freshman.  Once I finished Children of the Mind, I went on to read some of his earlier, stranger stuff, like Wyrms and “Hart’s Hope” from the Chrysalis 8 collection.

As an author, I’ve always found him entertaining and his fiction always gave me a lot to think about.  But as much as I enjoyed his stories, it was his newspaper columns that kept me reading.  His OSC Reviews Everything column (which is still ongoing) continues to fascinate and intrigue, as he talks about everything from books and movies to food and history.  And his World Watch column (which isn’t updated regularly, if at all, anymore) has had more impact on how I approach politics and is responsible for my no longer being a conservative (Ayn Rand is the reason that hasn’t changed, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

I found these columns on his website, www.hatrack.com, but that’s not even the most important thing for me.  His writing wasn’t his greatest creation—it was the Hatrack Writer’s Workshops, a forum for beginning and amateur authors to learn: the ins-and-outs of writing; what characterization, plot, and setting are about; sending up our stories to be critiqued by the other writers and to take part in critiquing theirs as well; learning the steps to publication; and best of all, it was where I met the wonderful people of my first writing group.  The year I spent writing, reading, and improving with them meant more to me in my literary attempts than anything else.  If Card had not opened up his site for that, that experience wouldn’t have happened.  I doubt I would have felt confident enough to even do this blog if it hadn’t have been for the help that group gave me those several years ago.

And while I don’t do Top Ten lists for my favorite books, I’m going to give my Top Ten favorites from the Orson Scott Card bibliography.  He’s done enough to deserve it.

1)      Hart’s Hope—the novel version, and is NOT the first book you should read by him.  It is heartbreaking and violent beyond anything he has ever written before or since.  It’s an incredibly complex novel; King Pelicroval, who everybody in the story sees as a hero, is heartlessly cruel and shameless.  The villainess, Queen Beauty, is surprisingly sympathetic.  I would root for her if she wasn’t so undeniably evil.  The unusual depth arises in that King Pelicroval really was the champion of the good side, and yet his flaws make you nauseous.  And yet, because of Queen Beauty’s cruelty and her willingness to kill her own children for vengeance made me want Pelicroval to win that second war.

 
And poor Orem, who is caught in their sick game and forced to make the greatest sacrifice of all.  In this high fantasy of men and gods, he makes the most god-like and selfless decisions, and without the gratitude or reward of anybody else in the story.  There’s a chord of truth in this book that hasn’t struck with me in any other book in Card’s bibliography.

2)      Ender’s Shadow—published 20 years after its companion/parallel novel, it took the smallest character from Ender’s Game and turned him into a giant.  If anything, it proved that Card has only gotten better with time.

3)      Ender’s Game—if you haven’t read anything by Card, this is where to start.  This is one book I refuse to own in hardcover.  I’ve loaned this book out more than any others in my library.  So much so that I had to buy a new copy so I could continue to let others borrow it when my original was lost and demolished.

4)      Maps in a Mirror—this one is kind of a cheat.  It’s a short story collection, so instead of one story, I’m recommending about a hundred, and they’re all from a variety of subjects and genres.  But… I don’t care.  Of all his short story collections, this was the most fantastic.  It includes “Unaccompanied Sonata”, which Card considers his best written work.  I personally preferred “Sandmagic”, “The Porcelain Salamander”, and “Mortal Gods”, but the great thing about this collection is that there’s bound to be something for everyone.

5)      Saints—I really like the fictional Dinah Kirkham.  I was a little disappointed that she didn’t actually exist, although considering that she’s based on real women from early Latter-day Saint history, that’s all fine.  Besides, if nothing else, this book whet my appetite to learning as much of my Church’s history, something I discovered was a real lack of education on my part.

6)      A Storyteller in Zion—it’s actually not the greatest collection of essays I’ve ever come across, but the inclusion of “Consecration: A Law We Can Live With” continues to have a transformative influence on me.

7)      Characters and Viewpoint—this is a must read for anybody who wants to get into novel-writing as a profession.

8)      Songmaster—this kind of story is generally not my cup of tea: the soap opera.  And yet, this is one of the few times where I actually cared about each person in the love affairs, and because Card is not an idiot, the politics are well-thought out and compelling.

9)      Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus—there’s only so much you can do with a time-travel story.  There hasn’t been an original take on time travel since the Golden Age of science-fiction.  There are two things that make this book work: (1) this operates much like a heist novel, in that a lot of the fun is see the team pull off this incredible performance; in this case, they’re trying to keep Columbus from discovering America and making the future better for everyone; (2) some of the best parts is reading about the life of Columbus.  If it weren’t for the last hundred, which throw history to the wind, it wouldn’t make a terrible study of Columbus’s life, and he had a fascinating one.

 

10)  Magic Street—I still haven’t read or seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I still thought this was a fun take on Shakespeare and putting his characters into the modern world.