Sure: I think a lot of his stuff makes me cringe. And not only his latest. But I really like the first three books in the Alvin Maker series, as well as Ender;s Game, and nothing he writes since will change that for me. Also "Lost Boys" (the novella, not the novel), and a number of others.

Ender's Game, and the Shadow books. She's post-puberty in the second one, which I got about twenty pages in before throwing it across the room. It was just so sickeningly sexist. And badly written.

Ah. I never tried the Shadow books -- he lost me earlier than that. And it's been a long while since Ender's Game.

OK, but Gus I really was not calling him a pederast or a Nazi. I was bringing up those to illustrate a more general principle - judge the tale, not the teller. I've know some at least moderate Mormons who are in good standing in their church and don't take the positions OSC does - so I don't know that you can blame them entirely on being a Mormon. Hell, Harry Reid is a Mormon, and while I consider him kinda weaslly, he is by no means a right winger. So I have to assume that OSC is taking positions he wants to take and believes - not merely ones his church requires.

I was hoping they'd have more of Peter and Valentine's story, since they were my favorite parts of Ender's Game. But alas, not so much.

These days, the only one of his I reread regularly is The Worthing Saga.

Casual readers of the thread might imagine Typo and me are often on opposite side of an issue.

Not so much.

Having said that ... if knew more about Mormon precepts, I might use that knowledge to reduce Typo's arguments to dust, then cackle in an evil way. Fortunately, I don't have that knowledge, and we can all be spared my embarrassment.

My totally-unfounded notion of Mormon ideals is that they are aligned with OSC's works. Methinks I may need to better my understandings.

I got tired of Card because he came up with wonderful concepts, but I never thought his actual writing lived up to them. More of an idea man, really.

I see many Mormon ideals in OSC's writing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly I judge his books on whether they work as books, but you can see how his religion and politics inform his choices for stories, character arcs, and the like.

It's tougher to see that with Wagner or Dodgson's work. Wagner's music doesn't have anti-Semitic words, and beyond two books featuring a young girl as the protagonist, Dodgson's literary work doesn't map to pedophilia. (There's also the point that Dodgson's pedophilia is subject to controversy, and by no means as proven as OSC's Mormonism). I think it's much easier to appreciate Wagner and Dodgson's work independently of their politicial, religious, or moral personal tendencies.

Pound I'll let stand as a comparison. His politics do show up in The Cantos, which is the Pound most people will read, so appreciation of his poetry does have to be informed by an understanding of his politics.

There's also the point that Dodgson's pedophilia is subject to controversy, and by no means as proven as OSC's Mormonism.

I was going to note that while Dodgson's interest in Alice Liddell was certainly obsessive and charged with intimacy, the culture in Victorian England and what it allowed and didn't allow is so different from ours that to call him a pedophile distorts more than it conveys. He didn't molest children. I rather doubt he was masturbating while thinking about them, and he would've been scandalized at the implication. And even the weirdness of the staged tableau type pictures he took of children, was not an uncommon practice in his time.

There are a lot of authors whose personal hangups -- political or otherwise -- show up in their work. It's very rare for me that the quality of a work can overcome the obvious psychodrama of the author's journey. Sometimes it can happen (especially if an author left behind only one work, or if we as readers have winnowed him to just his best book), but, usually I can't bear to read three works by a single author in a row, because I go unconsciously uncovering authorial patterns, and usually end up psychonalyzing the author rather than reading the story. When I read Thomas Hardy, I am always thinking about Hardy, and not about his characters.

I've long wondered whether that kind of transparency was a failure, or just a different kind of writing; either way, I find it irritating and distracting.

There are many things to criticize in Card, not least of which is his massive lack of behavioral science knowledge in a writing field that praises science accuracy. But the authorial flogging issues, as stated, are (a) the mary suedom of the perfect, oppressed child and (b) the preachiness of Mormon doctrine shoehorned into the plot.