Heartfire - Orson Scott Card

Can you inherit nerdiness from your son? I was never a reader of fantasy or sci fi until I had Barrett. I always liked historical fiction. I needed something to read because I was keeping myself up at night worrying about everything...I needed a distraction. Barrett suggested the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card because it is alternate history (fantasy with some anchor to history). Two weeks later, I finished the fifth book: Heartfire. When I started Barrett thought that the series ended with the fifth book, nope there is a sixth. Well, while I am in the hunt for the last book, I thought I would share a passage from Heartfire. It doesn't tell much of the story but it is something I have seen as true, sad but true.

"Just when I think I might like you, Monsieur Balzac, you show yourself not to be a Gentleman." "I don't have to be a gentleman," said Balzac. "I am an artist." " You still walk on two legs and eat through your mouth." Margaret. "Being an artist doesn't give you special privileges. If anything, it gives you greater responsibilities." " I have to study life in all its manifestations," said Balzac. "Perhaps that is true," said Margaret. "But if you sample all the wickedness of the world, and commit every betrayal and every harm, then you will not be able to sample the higher joys, for you will not be healthy enough or strong enough - or decent enough for the company of good people, which is one of the greatest joys of all." "If they cannot forgive me my foibles, then they are not such good people, no?" Balzac smiled as if he had played the last ace in the deck. "But they do forgive your foibles," said Margaret. "Thy would welcome your company, too. But if you joined them, you would not understand what they were talking about. You would not have had the experiences that bind them together. You would be an outsider, not because of any act of theirs, but because you have not passed along the road that teaches you to be one of them. You will feel like an exile from the beautiful garden, but it will be you who exiled yourself. And yet you will blame them, and call them judgemental and unforgiving, even as it is your own pain and bitter memory that condemns you, your own ignorance of virtue that makes you a stranger in the land that should have been your home." "I always thought I would experiment with evil and imagine good because it was easier. Almost you convince me I should do it the other way around." said Balzac.