should i make this its own thread? i decided to add a bunch of books to my storygraph, both ones i read voraciously from middle school onwards and ones i want to read. heavily focusing on speculative fiction / SFF, especially by trans authors. A while ago I left off partway through Meanwhile Elsewhere which is an anthology of trans and queer science fiction.
anyway i’ve been rereading Ender’s Game, it’s still fascinating to me how Orson Scott Card can write with such empathy about the experiences of childhood marginalization and then be a vicious homophobe. weird weird dude. but book brought me right back to growing up as a ‘gifted kid’ and the kinds of things i used to think about. musings about time and space, what it must be like to be an alien, what if reality was a simulation, weird kid stuff that’s impossible to explain to adults who treat you like a baby.
i once hit a persistent bully with my tenor saxophone case on the bus when no one was watching. he called me f***** constantly, picking on me daily and in gym class etc. i smushed his face up against the bus window and held it there a couple seconds. he then threw a punch that glanced off my cheekbone, i kept walking down the aisle. he was fine but he knocked it off after that. stuff like that, where i had totally repressed a lot of that feeling, Ender’s Game brings back.