Adam Shields

Summary: Who knows how to summarize this book?

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Orson Scott Card.  I love many of his books (and hate a few as well.)  After listening to the Audioplay version of Ender’s Game and then re-reading Ender’s Game as well, I decided to go back and re-read Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

It has been a couple months but I finally finished Children of the Mind.  And I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as I remembered.  Part of it is the lowered expectations of previous memory.  But I also can catch a glimpse of what Card was trying to do.

Originally Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one book.  But Card got carried away and had to split it into two books. There are just too many ideas and too much going on in these books.

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Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about.  European history is one of those areas.  So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year.  This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review.  I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.)  There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.)  But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war.  It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong.  So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were.  Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops.  Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started.  At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

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Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale.  Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character.  Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary.  But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book.  The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

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Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.  

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there.  We loved France.  More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French.  He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.)  But he is more interested in the people of his community.  This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France.  There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community.  Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

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Summary: First in a dystopian series about a group of boys trapped in a maze.

When Thomas wakes up all he can remember is his name.  A group of teenage boys welcomes him to ‘the Glade’.

The Glade is a large open grassy area with high stone walls.  As Thomas asks questions he comes to understand that none of the boys can remember anything before the Glade.  Some have been there as long as 2 years.  The glade is in the center of a massive stone maze.  One that changes every night.

In the Maze the boys have created a functioning society.  And while there are always difficulties, this is not The Lord of the Flies.

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