During the holidays, I finished Children of the Mind, another novel by Orson Scott Card in the “Ender Quartet.” This wraps up this half of the eight-part series. Honestly, I’m hoping the other half of the series is more even. The pages turned fast enough, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the others I’ve read from Card.
However, the Afterword intrigued me, as Card explains some of the background reading which helped drive his thinking, including a Japanese historian I’ve never heard of, Kenzaburo Oe, and his book Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. Oe is a Nobel Prize winner for literature (1994). Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself is the title of his Nobel lecture, which was included in the “small book” of the same name that Card came across. I don’t know if Card’s Afterword for Children of the Mind would be of interest without reading the book, but I appreciated the glimpse of the depth of Card’s thinking, beyond what’s in the novels. And maybe in the distant future, I’ll try some Oe.