Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card

Continuing on with Ender, now I'm on the the parallel Shadow saga that tells the stories of Bean and other children in Ender's legendary Dragon army. Even more than that, Ender's Shadow is actually a parallel book to Ender's Game - the events take place roughly at the same time roughly in the same place but it's a story of Bean, one of Ender's friends from Battle School.

And Bean's story is most definitely worth telling, and in many ways this book is better than Ender's Game: Card is now a much more mature writer and the despite the familiarity of the events it's an entirely different book to the Game. In fact, for some reason this book had a huge effect on me: I never knew how much I loved the character of Ender before in this book Bean starts to pick him apart. As said, this book follows the story of Bean, the supernaturally intelligent small kid from the streets of Rotterdam. Bean sees the events from a very different perspective: where Ender is a natural and he instinctively does the right thing, Bean analyses everything rationally and jumps into logical conclusions. But unlike every other kid in Battle School, Bean doesn't love Ender: he's jealous and suspicious of him, until it becomes clear that Ender is needed more than he is. But even then, Bean is the only one with his superior intelligence who spots Ender's mistakes and fixes them for him... and this is perhaps the thing that was affecting me so badly. Even though before Ender's perfectness annoyed me, it was even more terrible in this book to realize that Ender wasn't perfect after all - what a mind-fuck. Just an outstanding book.

So after listening to the book I was about to run out to the rain and immediately go and buy the rest of the Shadow saga, when I listened to the epilogue Card had on the audiobook. He actually says he believes the audiobook is the best format for his books - in his opinion it's the perfect immersion media where the reader can concentrate on the content even better than when reading the book from an actual book. Whether it's the best media is I guess up to the individual reader/listener but I can say this: the audiobook implementations by Audio Renaissance of Card's books have been superb, the narrators are absolutely fantastic. So what the hell, why not - I'll get the rest of them as audiobooks too... can't really go wrong with them.

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