Catching Up: Orson Scott Card and Margaret Atwood

I've been a bit behind on updating about Kirkus Reviews posts. I've published two in the last month, one about Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and the other about Margaret Atwood.

Ender's Game is probably one of my favorite genre novels: it's one that I picked up when I was in high school, and I've read it every couple of years since then: it's gotten better with each reading.

Card is a controversial author, to say the least, and while I don't agree at all with him on a bunch of his stances, this is an instance where I've simply had to separate the author and the story from one another. Card himself noted that he attempts to remove any type of monologuing from his books, as his own views won't necessarily make sense in a far-future or speculative environment.

Orson Scott Card's Career-Defining Story, Ender's Game

I read Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale a while back, and it's still a haunting book: enormously relevant today, it's probably one of the better dystopian novels that I've picked up. I've picked up a number of her short stories, but I haven't read her other novels, something that I now feel the need to do.

Atwood also has a curious take on genre fiction, and it formed the basis of my look at her career.

Genre and Margaret Atwood