I just gave Ender’s Game to Receptionchick to read because I’m so impressed with its sequel, Speaker For the Dead. I’d never heard of Orson Scott Card before signing up with Audible.com a few years ago.

Speaker is the thematically richer, more mature, of the two books, but I feel that Ender’s Game gives you a necessary prelude to Speaker.

Speaker forces you to struggle with real issues of morality and their relationship with catholisism in the environment of an alien world. It’s about understanding, accepting, and living with others that are incompatible with you and yet thus creating a xeno-diverse society that is richer and more powerful than the individual peoples.

Cell is reminiscent of The Stand, King’s epic holocaustic book. Cell is more about love and family and the will that these combine to allow us to fight the odds. I did find The Stand more entertaining, however. King once said (either in On Writing or in the Dark Tower series) that a story is about the journey and not so much about how it ends. This journey left me uneasy about my cell phone for a couple of days after I’d finished the book.

Blair and Larissa lent The Time Traveler’s Wife to us… It’s simple science fiction. But more importantly it’s simply about love. It’s about a love that builds out of time, within time, and over time. The depth of love that Henry and Clair develop for each other sneaks up on you until you realize how precious and rare and timeless it is. The book leaves the reader realizing that no matter how fragile our time on Earth can be, love will transcend.

Stationary Bike is a novella/short story that I found entertaining I haven’t read tons of King material, but it’s one of my favourites by him–along with Bag of Bones (I did find that he wrote an awesome love story in Wizard and Glass). Bike is about life and the creative process and how the two must coexist symbiotically for a person to be truly fulfilled. King hints at this in much of his work since being struck by a car in the late 90′s. I think that it was this realization (along with how short life is) that pushed him to finally finish the Dark Tower series.

Lots of people are understandably feeling betrayed after having put the time and emotional energy into reading Frey’s memoirs only to find out that he lied. Oprah is no exception.

There’s a part in his book describing his experience of having multiple root canals without anesthetic. This is unrealistic to most people and also probably untrue in his case. Novocaine hasn’t been used in Dentistry for decades (we use other types of local anesthetics such as lidocaine) and most root canal procedures would be excruciating without anesthetic because we’re fiddling directly with nerve tissue. There’s also the issue of the local anesthetic potentiating his drug addiction. That’s untrue because local has no addictive properties. Local anesthetic interrupts nerve conduction rather than binding to receptors in the brain like general anesthetics or narcotics which make you feel stoned enough to not care about pain.

That being said, most endodontists have done some number of cases without anesthetic. For some patients, the fear of the needle outweighs the actual procedure. If you combine this fear with a tooth that is asymptomatic and already dead (no live nerve in it), it is possible to do a root canal without anesthetic. In fact, there are some cases where the tooth is so heavily infected that anesthetic wouldn’t work anyway because of the amount of pus that has gone into the gums. When these teeth are opened up and pus spews out, the patient usually feels substantial immediate relief.