Ender's Game is about loneliness and the difficulty of relating to one another. Ender is valuable because he is empathetic, but not too sympathetic like Valentine or manipulative like Peter. Ender is alone as a genius; noone can step in to save him, and the only people he can relate to are other child geniuses. Adults are always stupid or manipulative to Ender, like his parents or Admiral Griff or Mazer Rackham. Because of his gift he is used to kill the Buggers that he understands and loves, all because the Buggers didn't understand the value of human life. So, to bridge the gap between our understanding, we need someone to help us, someone who's empathetic, someone who is a Speaker for the Dead. Ender's empathy and genius is used as a weapon, to turn him into what he fears most, which is becoming Peter. (I had to do a book report on Ender's Game and child soldiers and I felt like the report missed the meaning. This feels better.)

Warlight, by Ondaat Sondje or something. There's two negligible books, one's about a guy who reminisces about his spy childhood and spends his whole life looking backwards and there's another about a girl who spreads a rumor about an indecent relationship and destroys her sister and potential sister's boyfriend's lives. Then she writes a play about it and gets famous or something, her grandkids perform it. Didn't like them, pretentious modern fiction about stupid people. Slow and empty.

A Gentleman in Moscow. Man gets imprisoned in the Metropolitan, lives there until he's old, sees Moscow change from the aristocratic to the Bolshevik regime and two generations of Russia. Enjoyable.

The Portable Cervantes - Don Quixote Parts I and II, abridged. It's cool. Guy gets charmed by books into believing a fantasy (say, like the internet?) then goes around constantly getting the shit beat out of him for a fair lady Dulcinea (who doesn't exist), being charmed by evil enchanters into... fighting a windmill, and then throwing himself on rocks to prove his loyalty to a nonexistent lady. Glorious. I'm laughing right now man. But really it's about delusions and the nature of subjective reality and how we can rationalize insanity. I didn't expect the ending, it's very bittersweet. Totally worth reading.

Narcissus and Goldmund. Loved this book. It's about this kid Goldmund without a mother who gets sent to live in a monastery/church to learn things but doesn't do well, but he makes friends with an older scholarly monk named Narcissus who advises him to take a different path. As a teen Goldmund uh... has sex with a woman, but she has a husband and the pursuit of sex convinces him to leave the monastery. Then he wanders around and discovers sculpture, makes that his life, it doesn't work out, has some more affairs, lives through the black plague, and then returns to the monastery and his friend Narcissus to spend his last years creating masterful carvings for the church. Basically the whole time he is trying to create the perfect image of nature and femininity/the mother, and right when he has the talent and the inspiration, he dies, but he's not sad about it, he had a full and interesting life.

The Epiphany Machine. The writer kicked me in the nuts. The book is about a guy who is too cowardly to take charge of his own life and wastes it all and makes everyone hate him. It starts with the machine-- a sewing machine looking contraption that tattoos an epiphany on your arm in big block letters that's spot on. The epiphany is always "something you already knew." Nobody knows if it's magic or the operator, Adam, but the MC's life circulates around the machine and the people with epiphany tattoos and documenting the things that happen. Painful to read, but worth it.

1984, George Orwell. Good shit, mostly for the concepts. Ends how you'd expect, spoilers, not well. Somehow I never expected a love plot in dystopia.

Animal Farm, George Orwell. Supposedly a pseudo-biography about his experience with the Communists, basically one group of animals, the pigs, elevates themselves above the rest and then become the owners they overthrew while the rest of the animals live worse lives compliantly. Fun fact, pigs are also supposed to be the smartest livestock closest to humans.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. I didn't get much from this one, maybe I'll reread it. Two guys talk about how all of society is so facile, then one of them throws out the Soma happy drugs that motivates everyone and just pisses everyone off. They get an offer to move to the independent thinker colony and one guy accepts and the other doesn't because he thinks it's a gulag. Also the elites are siphoned and bred, while the B class and C class serve their respective roles. Honestly it sounds like Marxist propaganda.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. Okay, this one was cool. Firefighters now just burn books to preserve ignorance, then MC's neighbor's kid who reads and isn't braindead like most of society gets run over. He starts reading and his teammates destroy his books, he runs off and lives with the tribe of people who remember the books they once read, then the U.S. gets nuked and the tribe of classical knowledge will have to rebuild civilization. Maybe it didn't have a bunch of kewl new concepts, but it made me actually care about the dystopia and what was happening.

Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood. Literally "Christian Bad." Also "Old White Man Bad." Fertile women forced into societal roles and servitude as surrogate mothers for powerful white Christian men rendered unfertile by nuclear war or some shit, it's bonkers. Really, it's insulting to assume that women are so weak that the second some religious-political upheaval occurs in the U.S. they're just going to flop over, also that Christians are going to find scriptural excuses for polygamy (That's Mormon/Taliban shit). You know who created some religious-political-sexual upheaval? Hippies. You know who's up for polygamy? Nymphomaniac liberal cucks who support sex freedom and abortions. C'mon, let's wifeswap. The propaganda here is really damn obvious and that's why lefties love it. Sorry if you actually like it, I've had a change of priorities since I read it. I do remember thinking it was propaganda at the time.

Scythe. Neat YA sci-fi romance about a world where death has to be administered by an elite group of "scythes" because natural death has been eliminated. In retrospect, an edgy choice of fiction, I got it because it had a slick cover design at B&N. The sequels are incredibly meh.