How about a good sci-fi classic now, something’s that I see or hear mentioned just about once a month in blogs and podcasts (in reference to the advancement of modern videogaming)?

Ender’s Game starts out like a silly children’s book, with six-year-old brethren professing everlasting love, and nude, sweaty ten-year-olds trainees wrestling under the showers and… uh, yeah, it’s awkward like that sometimes (not least of all because I was right out of Stephenson’s 17th century, where the word “buggers” has quite another connotation).

But it’s still a pretty good sci-fi story, and it deserves to be a classic. Although it doesn’t look like it in the first chapters, the author doesn’t shy away from addressing the ambiguous morality of isolating and training kids to become great masters of war, or trying to wipe out an alien race in an extension of the concept of self-defense; and while the ending is more than predictable, what really got me was the epilogue — which also happens to be the introduction to the book’s sequels, that I’d already have if I could still rely on mail order.

A quick, easy read, definitely recommended.