This book is a must-read. It is the sequel to Ender’s Game (which you must read first!) and continues the story of Ender, 3000 years after the first novel ends.
Speaker is somewhat more of a difficult read than the first book, due to Card’s use of ethnic Portuguese names — and to his use of nicknames in place of all these unpronounceable strings of random letters. The book even has a pronounciation guide in the front, which I encourage you to ignore unless you’re a linguist.
This book, like Ender’s Game, won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
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Throughout the first third of this book, I was convinced it would be among my favorites, but then it got a bit too outlandish. The story combines anthropology and science fiction to rewrite human history, and the result is fascinating. The plot slows toward the middle of the book, as if Becker wasn’t able to sustain the wildly imaginative pace of the beginning, but still, if you enjoyed Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones movies, Total Recall, Sphere, etc., you’ll find something to like in Link.
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Hiaasen has a way of doing awful things to characters, like having a Shriner get tangled up in the tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war, without making it seem like such a bad thing. This book follows a theme of Hiassen’s, in which the bad guys are planning to bulldoze or pave some tiny remaining unblemished aspect of Florida’s native ecosystem, and the good guys go to astounding lengths to stop them. It’s a pro-ecology book dressed up like a thriller, and like all of Hiassen’s books, it’s tough to put down.
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This book was enjoyable to read, but perhaps more enjoyable to finish. It’s a heavyweight (700 pg) murder mystery, changing locales from New England to Rome to Cairo along the way. Gifford apparently spent nine years researching this book, and the result spins enough threads together to make that believable. If you like piecing a large story together over time, this book is for you.
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Starring Woods’ most familiar character, Stone Barrington, Dead in the Water is a memorable thriller set in the Carribean islands. Part mystery, part courtroom drama, this book is a quick, enjoyable read, with a nice twist at the end.
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