Literary Crushes
Day 2. I’ll be posting one a day for the next ten days–a list of my top ten completely platonic and not in any way obsessive literary crushes. Here follow my all-time favorite cerebral, brooding, and sometimes tragic heroes in my very favorite books about them.
Andrew “Ender” Wiggin. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Set apart from birth to save the world from the next attack of aliens, Ender is brought to Battle School to learn to be a ruthless general. While there, he defies the best-laid plans of Graff and the other teachers to form a band of child soldiers who, like he does, think outside the box. The main lessons Ender learns, however, are that he must strike the enemy very hard and that he must never lose, not once. This suspenseful, psychological masterpiece questions the ethics of war: is it murder if you didn’t know you were doing it?
Key points: child genius, school setting, innovative aliens, espionage, anguish, family psychology, war games
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