This is one of the best stories and best written books I’ve ever read. One of the ways I can tell how much I like the book is how much I’m willing to do other stuff while listening. With this book there was very little I was able to do while listening, since I was so taken in by the world that was being built and the story that was being told. I can’t wait for the last book to come out so that I can finish the series.
This was a very interesting collection of short stories. The meeting of Ender’s parents was quite good. I liked the parity that my life has to it. The version of Ender’s game in this was much less mature and didn’t have some of the really psychological parts to it. The meeting of Ender and Jane was also a good story. I liked the part about the tax collector, and how Ender’s holdings just wouldn’t stop scrolling. This wasn’t the best of the Ender series, but it also wasn’t the worst.
This had a lot of good points but it was basically how to win friends and influence people in mass. It is good for those who haven’t read other books along these lines, but I’d focus on the other ones first.
This was a cute short story about a fundamentalist Christian at battle school in the Ender universe. He gets picked on and then is brought out of his shell by Ender. The story was cute, but not anything special.
I’d say this is one of the weaker books in the series, as there wasn’t much focus on anything. There was the conflict of mother-daughter, the conflict of admiral-Ender, and the conflict of Ender-Achilles. The book lacked a coherent center, and even the world building that it did, didn’t have a good center about which it focused. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but look forward to the meeting of the shadow and Ender series, despite the main character of both being dead.
This book had a lot of good information, but most of it I had heard before in the other books I’ve been listening to. I agree with many of the premises put forward, especially that the leadership style will have be responsive to the situation. I need to work on a basic leadership style laid out in this lecture series, but I’m not too far behind in understanding it. I’m just far behind in implementation.
This was my favorite of the shadows series. The setting and interactions are so different. The book is also shorter, and it makes me look forward sooo much to the two series coming back together. I enjoy all the contrary information provided by this book about the Hive Queens.
This book had a lot of great suggestions about leadership and how to get people to do the things you want them to do. This does a lot of good explanations on the how to do it, but the part that I tend to struggle with is the internal conflict of whether what I’m trying to get someone to do something that isn’t good for them. I’ll have to learn to convince myself of the great things that people will get from helping me.
This was a decent story, but didn’t have the kind of ending I would have liked. It had a lot of vague parts after Bean left the picture, where everyone just ended up getting along. That wasn’t the best of the stories in the series by far. I liked Ender’s Shadow the most with the rest going downhill from there. I am looking forward to the next book since there won’t be nearly as much baggage and it will be a completely different setting. I think it will have some really good elements.
It's an Exciting World 