1. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugresic. These interrelated stories, which concern the aging of women, are so far my favorite fiction of the year. This was from a Bookslut recommendation; here is one review.
2. Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. Not as good as Ender's Game and the trilogy, but still worth reading if you have an interest in the series.
3. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Some parts of this story are very good, but overall I felt manipulated by the author and I was glad when it was over. I prefer Henning Mankell.
4. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time. This new translation is a big improvement on the old and thus a chance to rediscover a classic of Russian literature.
5. The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk. There's nothing new in here, plus not everybody can be a genius.
While nothing can touch the charm of the original Ender’s Game, I prefer the Bean/Petra/Peter series on Earth to the Lusitania Trilogy. Ender’s Shadow is necessary back story for the tale of Peter’s ascension to the Hegemony. If you like stories about what makes societies tick (which I’d guess just about everyone here does) and near-term speculative fiction, these are well worth reading. (Ender in Exile; the most recent book, which bridges the two series to some extent, is completely forgettable and not worth your time.)
Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian, defined genius as an infinite capacity
for taking pains. More earthily, someone else described genius as
10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.
I find David Shenk’s rejection of “intellectual fatalism” (the idea
that our brains have circumscribed limits) attractive: the plasticity
of neurons.
I actually just watched the film adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was actually kind of engaging.
Didn’t Nabokov translate A Hero For Our Time?
Can someone explain why The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is supposed to be good? Nothing occurs in the book until page 310! And then there’s a short bit of totally ridiculous action near the end of the book, which is very unbelievable and contains a few plot holes. It was such a poorly paced book.
The more Card writes the harder time I have believing he actually wrote the original Ender’s Game.
It seems like a lot of people are convinced of Shenk’s thesis, because they WANT to be convinced of it (Salon reviewer). Has anyone who actually knows anything about the subject reviewed his book?
Judging from Shenk’s appearance with Will Wilkinson, there are two problems with his ideas:
1. He attacks strawmen, like suggesting that people like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein don’t understand heritability or that IQ researchers don’t understand that the environment affects gene expression.
2. He makes god of the gaps type arguments, like the fact that we haven’t found any genes that correlate significantly with IQ.
As for the 10,000 hour thesis, well it is true that to be a genius you have to put in the time and effort necessary master your area, but that doesn’t mean that an ordinary person who puts in the same amount of time and effort will become a genius. Likewise opportunity is necessary too, but isn’t sufficient. In other words, genius requires natural talent plus hard work plus opportunity. This seems so obvious to me that I wonder why anyone would believe otherwise.
I liked the original Ender book, and would have liked to read more, but I can’t stomach Card’s political views or his vile bigotry, so I won’t buy his books.
I read Shenk’s “Genius Blog” for a while when it started but gave up after he had resisted attempts at education by myself and others on basics. The man doesn’t understand probability. I mean that in very basic terms – he fails to acknowledge that getting a bad thing with a probability of .3 is better than getting it with a probability of .6. He doesn’t understand comparison groups. Doesn’t understand how to interpret scientific results quite generally. And his posts would usually be all “straw we”, in the style of: “We all think musical talent’s 100% inborn. Here’s what the evidence shows . . .”
The man’s clearly not qualified to write about the topic.
Ender’s Shadow was horribly disappointing. If anything, it’s just evidence that good authors shouldn’t grow old and cranky.
Ender’s Shadow isn’t bad, but as others have indicated, the series goes off a cliff. You are at a bad point when the gay character has a speech to the effect that natalism is so important that he got married to a woman and impregnates her as often as possible. In a book where the protagonist literally gestated in a jar, no need for female presence at all.
I wrote about Shenk’s arguments here:
Responding To Shenk
thanks for the pointer on Ugresic … read “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender” a few years ago, thought it was excellent.
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