Like books that got very popular but you never really could get into.
Enders Game was one of my favorite books… until I turned 17 or 18.
If you didn’t read it before you were eligible to learn to drive a car I’m not surprised you didn’t like it.
Its a great book for middle school aged kids, for adults it’s just OK.
If you didn’t read it before you were eligible to learn to drive a car I’m not surprised you didn’t like it.
You hit the nail in the head with that, I read it as a first year university student. The Heinlein juvenile novels are high art by comparison.
That was my surprise when talking about it online years later, the number of adults who loved it. The ones who read it at school and were in nostalgia mode I could understand but those that read it in their 20s I could not.
I’m one of them, read it when I was 25 or older. I liked the “chosen one” rhetoric being used to exploit Ender. I liked the bleakness of it all. While it was clear what the plot twist was going to be, he didn’t know, and this hit a tragic note for me. The book conveys all sides (Ender’s, the government’s, the alien’s) letting the reader getting stuck between opposing ethics, and not solving the contraposition at any point. The acceptance of the final, horrible result just adds to the bleakness created by all the violence leading up to that point.
I think I had just read to much SF before reading it. Everything it did I had read it done better before in other works.
I’m guessing the people who liked it as adults didn’t grow up reading lots of scifi so it seems more original and fresh to them. I’ve been a big scifi guy since I was in grade school. The book is full of tropes and they felt stale to me by the time I was graduating high school.
I haven’t read Enders Game since about 1991. I still read through most of the Heinlein juveniles every few years although some have aged worse than others.