Books

I consider Ender's Game to be one of the best sci-fi books ever written. The follow-ons, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide... not so much. I haven't read the books about Peter and the Ender's Battle School compatriots, but I may do so now. I just finished reading Ender in Exile. Not so much a sequel as a fill-in for what happened between the time Ender won his battle and the time he found the Hive Queen. It's an odd sort of book in that it just ends, There's no discernible climax. It's just a few hundred pages of Ender as the main character in a story where I already new the beginning and the end. Apparently that's enough when the character in question is Andrew Wiggin. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, but it's really more like unearthing some lost sections of the end of the first book than reading something new.

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A novel by Jennifer Fallon.

I read this excellent fantasy novel over the holiday. It's something of a biography of an immortal who has tired of living and failed in his attempt to use the kingdom of Lebec's legal system to get himself decapitated. The execution inexplicably fails, and the immortal's claim to be one of the legendary Tide Lords threatens to become a major societal issue. The main character is the Duchess of Lebec, an academic who must debunk his claim to immortality and who seeks to prove the immortal is either a liar or insane. Half the story is made up of him telling her stories of his life, with the other half devoted to political intrigue revolving around her husband, the Duke, and the possible impact of the immortal's failure to die.

I recently finished Jim Butcher's Codex Alera Book 5: Princep's Fury. If you haven't started this series yet, consider yourself fortunate because once the first book gets rolling, it's superior entertainment. Just as good as the excellent Dresden series, and maybe better.

This book is getting 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon, which I think is about right. It is the best written book of the bunch, with fantastic pacing and great balance of the four different concurrent stories that kept me enthralled with each in nearly equal measure. The only real flaw is that it's far too short and essentially ends in the middle of the story. I'd like to have seen it combined with the next book, but on the other hand, I'm glad I got to read it now.

Spoilers Below