Random Babblings

Ashes of Victory. Not having review any of the other books here I’ll go into some more general feeling of the series. As I had said, fantasy had been my forte for a while but I wanted a change of pace. The Honor Harrington series has been that for the most part. While I’m not known for stopping the reading of a book because I don’t like it, I have no problems stopping reading a series, so the fact that I’m up to book nine says something.

The Honorverse as it is called is a series of Science Fiction war stories, mostly space battles, but the political and individual stories that go behind them as well. The main character is Honor Harrington a commander in the Royal Manticoran Space Navy. The series mostly follows her progression though the war, and her rise through her birth nation and a local allied nations navies.

By Ashes of Victory, Honor is an Admiral in the RMN and due to some injuries sustained in the previous books is working as an instructor at the navies Officer School. This represented a great shift in the series. For the first time 90% of the action of the book does not involve the lead character. To that point over half of the book doesn’t even include her. Even further the list of “lead” characters is somewhat long.

I don’t usually have a problem with multi-lead books, but this time I did. I’m not sure if it was a sense of disconnect, for eight books we’ve had one lead character with the occasional aside for some other characters or other settings. Now we have the traditional multiple leads, and switch perspective between them every chapter or so. I think one of the problems, is that some of these characters just weren’t strong enough. Most of these new “leads” were the supporting role characters that we’ve seen and heard from every now and then, but their personalities weren’t strengthened into lead characters. Not enough to turn me off, but enough to reduce my enthusiasm for the book.

Overall I’d rate this as a 3/5. For the moment though I’m going to set aside the series, but I’ll be back soon.

Next up: Hinterland: Book Two of the Godslayer Chronicles

Guitar Hero 3. I’d been trying to pick this puppy up for a week or so. Been hard to find in the stores. Thankfully I had a half day on Friday and I took the opportunity to go looking for a copy. Glad I did, because the one store said they didn’t expect any till the 26th, and the store I found it at was the last copy they had.

It’s something of a funny story about my desire for this game. It started many, many moons ago at a FLGS named Tower of Games. I was there of course to play board games, but they had a Wii and a PS2 setup on one wall, and the guitar hanging next to them. My friend Jim was there and mentioned that he owned it. So I gave it a whirl, Jim gave me a few pointer along the way, but one thing was pretty clear… I sucked. I probably played or about half an hour, and set it aside. There was an interest there, but it was a $80 game for a system that I didn’t own. Yes there is a PS2 in the house, but that’s Staci’s, so it never became too much of an issue for me.

Then the fateful day came that they announced GH3, for the XBox 360, the PS3, and the Wii. And that little niggle that had been in the back of my skull kicked in. I never quite obsessed about it, but the desire was there. I talked to Jim about it, sure enough he was getting it and also for the Wii. And GH3 was going to add network play.

Fast forward a little while and I come home one day to a GH2 box sitting in my den. Seems Elise had borrowed it for a little while. I ignored it for a few days, but then one day, home alone, I played it again. And I still sucked, but only at first. I was slowly getting better and getting into the groove. By the time it went back, I had probably played the game more than Elise.

So back to this weekend. I’ve gotten pretty good at the game. I’ve already finished on easy, need to go back and 5-star a few songs, and I’m making progress on medium. I doubt I’ll finish on hard for a good long while, and expert is probably completely out.

Ashes of Victory is the 9th book in David Webber‘s Honor Harrington series. I started reading this series earlier this year as a change of pace. I mainly read fantasy, Jordan, Martin, etc, etc… And since I read a lot I tend to see lots of similarities between books. I had kinda hit the rut of reluctant boy hero finds out he has great powers and has to save the world. Not all of the books I’ve read are that story, and sometimes it’s changed up (reluctant girl hero), but I wanted something that was completely different, and would last me a while.

So I plowed through the science fiction titles of the local book store and landed on Webber. I had heard of him before but being into fantasy more than SciFi had kinda passed him over. I’m not sure that I completely escaped the rut. Honor is still a reluctant hero, though perhaps that’s not quite fair. The series is a SciFi Space Military drama, and I’m sure most commanders in the military accept possible hero status at least a little reluctantly. Sure some revel in the power, but I guess they wouldn’t make interesting enough characters to last as long as this series has.

So that gets back to the fantasy. Are the heroes reluctant because they have to be? Do power hungry heroes just not work, does it just turn them into villains. Maybe I just need to read more anti-hero novels, not that I have any desire to read Thomas Covenant.

In the end, I’ve enjoyed this series, and will probably try and read more SciFi in the future, but perhaps I’ve realized to take the stories for what they are.

So among my many hobbies is Reading and playing board games. I play games at least once a month out our monthly game day, But I’m always reading. I don’t know that I’m ever not reading one book or another. I’ve gone ahead an put of some widgets here to show what I’ve played recently, and what I’m currently reading. The times I play games varied and will sometimes play multiple games in one day, so those updates will probably be random. I usually am only reading one book at a time, so those should be steady. I might leave one past book and the current book, we’ll see how it turns out.

So read some books and play some games.

So I’m thinking about this more often, if not writing as much as I’d like to.

Bunch of the WW folks got together for a holiday party, and for a bunch of ladies trying to loose weight there was sure a lot of food around. I didn’t help either.

One of my favorite thing of this time of year is egg nog. I used to be a good little consumer and pick up my nog at the local megamart. Sure I’d had the local dairy’s nog on occasion, and they also made a similar beverage called Colonial Custard, but by and large I drank my nog from a carton. Usually not straight, that stuff can be thick on occasion so I would cut it with milk, or occasionally some alcohol.

But the other year I was enlightened. My personal tutor of all things scrumptious introduced me to homemade nog. Being a dutiful follower of his teachings I set out to make try my hand at some of this creation.  It was a success.  For some reason though I still only make it during the holidays, but that’s ok.