Audiobook finished

[johnridley]

The Honor of the Queen by David Weber

Honor is part of a diplomatic mission to secure a strategically placed ally in the upcoming war with Haven. The planet in question is highly patriarchal and they are insulted by the very idea of women in uniform, let alone commanding a combat group. She tries to let the insults pass, but of course eventually insult and harm comes to her people, and that's where things turn around.

Wow, this was very good. I found myself laughing and crying at many points through the book. Also, I don't find Weber's stuff predictable; all too often I know the ending of the book by the time I get 1/3 of the way through. I hate that. I mean, sure, Honor is going to survive, because I know there are more books, but she takes a lot of damage and barely makes it through enough to make it very interesting.

I talked to a friend yesterday who shares my tastes for space opera, and it turns out he's already up to book 10. He loves this series too, though he warned me that book 9 pretty much stinks, but book 10 makes up for it.

I normally don't make my book finished posts public, but I thought I would on this one in case anyone was looking for a good series to start on. I've left out my usual spoilers, I'll make a private post for them.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Heh, my reading is probably not going to introduce anyone to anything new. It's rare that I'm reading anything that was written in the last 30 years. This and Elizabeth Moon's "Heris Serrano" series were recommended to me by a friend at work, and are exceptions that were actually written since 1990, but apart from that I've been just trying out stuff like hitting the Hugo nominees, which I must say is hit and miss. On the one hand, it gave me Vinge's Deepness and Fire, but OTOH it gave me Vinge's Rainbows End, which I just finished and honestly thought it was a waste of electrons.

What I'm reading right now is alternating between Honor #3, "The Short, Victorious War" and 1984. They're both good. 1984 is surprisingly good. I don't know why I thought it would be less gripping than I'm finding it, but I did. It's easy to read, and has enough ideas for years of thinking, though of course I've absorbed lots of the ideas in it vicariously through other people talking about it.

I did do a "what I've read in the last 6 months" overview at the beginning of July, and plan to keep doing that. I just go back through my private posts and list what I read without the spoilers.

In my private posts I leave a plot summary which includes blatant spoilers. This is just notes to myself, because honestly, my memory is so bad that I can't even remember whether I've read a book or not even just 10 years later. After a few months the characters are pretty vague in most cases, so if I want to pick up a series again a while later I figured it'd be helpful to have a synopsis.

OTOH, for popular works Wikipedia seems to have a cliff's notes for many stories.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I'm probably about as "far behind" as you are with regards to stuff to read. I'm nowhere near the level of my college reading habit and I'm doing maybe a book or two every six months that's outright fiction.

As far as Rainbow's End goes, it certainly wasn't like his other novels but I'd say the people development was about the same. His people aren't very deep - just his technology.

(I posted my review of Rainbow's End a while ago.)

I hear you about that bad memory. That's one of the reasons I maintain my journal. It's already helped me find things within the last five years that I would have lost date-wise.