SciFi

As a rule of thumb I tend to avoid SciFi books. Nothing personal, they just don't usually capture my interest. But! There are exceptions:

Star WarsLegacy of The Force: The biggest exception, I've been hooked on the Post-Return of The Jedi books since just after high school. Not all of them, but there were a few good miltary-strategem focused books that detailed the war with the Imperial Remnant that I enjoyed, and there was a twenty-book New Jedi Order story arc that took place about 25 years after the 'last' movie (chronologically) that I worked through. It was fairly epic, they didn't shy away from killing billions of people over the five years it covered, and that includes major characters.

A couple of years later they released a three-book story that wasn't terribly good but did take place ~35 years after the last movie, so it followed up on some of the characters from the NJO storyline. Another year or so later they started putting out a nine-book arc called Legacy of The Force that is currently a little over 40 years after ROTJ and is extremely dark and political.
Much of it is reminding me of 24, with its interrogation, torture and remorseless murder, but what keeps striking me is that some of it would probably be really well received if they changed the fact that it was Star Wars. There's a lot of subtext and existentialism, all against a backdrop of political betrayals and questions of terrorism and the cost of safety vs. freedom, which is incredibly relevant for today's governmental practices, but is again lost because, hey--Wookies.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy: Douglas Adams is amazing. I read these in third grade (sans Mostly Harmless, which had not yet been released) and then again a few years back. I was going to pick up the Radio Scripts that the books spawned from the other day, but held off in lieu of the backlog I'm already working through.

Neil Gaiman: I've read parts of Good Omens and it was excellent, but I fell off and stopped reading it. I've read his children's books--which are worth checking out just for Dave McKean's art--and his slightly older audience (not by much) book Coraline, which I guess they're making into a movie? I really want to check out American Gods and Neverwhere, the former of which he won a good few awards for.

Ender's Game: Really the point of this whole post--I just started it last night, it's very decent so far. I loved when his older brother threatened to murder him and claim it was an accident, then went into a rant about how he was going to make sure it happened in a few years just so their sister could look back on this childish coversation and feel guilty for even suspecting that he was serious all along. That aside, the dialogue is good and enough people have told me to read that I expect it to be pretty damn clever.

Dune: Frank Herbert is also amazing. It took me three attempts to get over the 100-page hump that starts the book off, but it's hard to put down once you get into the swing of it. And the series gets so goddamn epic later on, 4000 years into the future... Craziness. I really just need to finish the fifth book and be done with it, but it's another one I walked away from and I'm not sure how easy it would be to pick back up.

(edit: [sic] this is to be expounded, I've had to break for work work)