It wouldn't be such a bad thing for the story to be re-recorded without the performance issues.

Again, it didn't lessen the story, but it was distracting. Usually, I expect some of that background music to signal a change in chapter, theme, or something else recognizable. There was one location in particular in which music just started playing mid-sentence and the ended in the middle of the following sentence. Again, this seemed to show up in random locations. As if that weren't bad enough, there was also periodic background music that was played during the performance. Even so, the shifting back and forth was distracting. After all, it's the same story whether listening to one narrator or 50. I certainly don't want to say that this lessened the story in any way. At times, there were shifts from one narrator to another mid-paragraph, and it didn't seem to be done for any reason. The problem was that there were just too many narrators, and they were used inconsistently throughout the book. I don't want to say that the actual performance of the narrators was bad because it really wasn't. The audio recording of this book was terrible. I loved 'Ender's Game,' yet I think I enjoyed 'Speaker for the Dead' just as much-only for different reasons. I feel as if it's written for a more mature audience, and its themes reflect that maturity. He wrote 'Ender's Game' as a kind of introduction to 'Speaker for the Dead.' Although 'Ender's Game' has become far more well-known and more popular than 'Speaker for the Dead,' I can see why this was the story that the author really wanted to write. According to interviews with the author, Orson Scott Card, 'Speaker for the Dead' was the original book that he wanted to write. Great story, but the performance was dreadfulĪfter having read 'Ender's Game,' I was eager to read 'Speaker for the Dead.' I was definitely not disappointed. First Meetings, however contains short stories that occur both before and in between the list above within the Enderverse. If you were to read the books in the order they were published, you would bounce back and forth in between time and few of the plot twists in future books would be revealed before you wanted them to be known. Meaning that the flow of events in the stories are uninterrupted. The list above is sorted by the Enderverse timeline.

If after reading all of these wonderful books you are still itching for an Enderverse fix then read First Meetings. Reading the books in this order will keep you interested and keep the story moving more naturally. Recommended order of reading (in my opinion): Ender?s Game, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind. The characters are easy to identify with, and you will find yourself sucked into this imaginary universe, nicknamed the Enderverse by fans. This is my favorite science fiction series.

Speaker for the dead ender's game