Clair High
I liked this one better than the first in the series. It's still all-military, but it was much more about the characters and their conflicts more than the battles themselves. I may just continue to read the series.
I started reading Scalzi with Starter Villain, which I loved it's hilarious, light-hearted, supervillain story. To see if I liked Scalzi's writing further, I decided to go with the Old Man's War series. I'm not sure that was a good decision. That statement is not a reflection upon this book.
It's a pretty good book. I at least superficially liked the characters with in it. I'm not one to overly like war/military stories, but I did choose to read it). I didn't like the Full Metal Jacket cliché of "boot camp". But I did like the story of taking "elderly" people and giving them new life and putting them in new situations. I would like to have seen more, intentionally diverse characters in main roles and more interactions between them rather than battle scenes. Perhaps it's what they've been through that makes the characters, but we'll never know because it wasn't written that way.
Because this series name is the same as this book, if it continues with nothing but war and battle, I may lose interest. I'd prefer conflict of a different nature.
First DNF of 2024. Made it 25% into it and I'm done—between the awful husband, the wife's self harm, etc. not interested in trying to push on through. It took me a /week/ to get this far. That should've told me something before now.
I had difficulty reading parts of this book (I blame me, not the author) and rage read other parts. However, the themes and lessons to be learned are valuable and relevant today.
It's a story. More fantasy than science-fiction. I had a time piecing together what the events in the first part of the book actually meant with regards to the story. I had to read someone else's synopsis to then realize, "oh! That's what happened!" I'm glad I'm starting here with Le Guin. Her works can only get better, I assume.
I plan on reading more of the Hainish to at least get to the book I'd purchased first, The Left Hand of Darkness.
The better the vaccine, the more abstract the disease it targets becomes.
In retrospect, it's gotten worse.
I liked the book when I read it in 2006, but knowing what I know about Shermer, I need to reassess that.
I tried to read this book like four times. I almost finished it (77 page masturbatory speech totally killed it). At the time, I wanted to like it, but came to realize how poorly written and how flimsy its ideology and characters truly are.
Read this with the kid and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved listening to my kid try to Moodle through the mystery.
