2015 Reading Challenge: On Basilisk Station (Honor Harringont #1) by David Weber

Synopsis:

Honor Harrington in trouble: Having made him look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system. But the people out to get her have made one mistake. They've made her mad! 

My rating: 2.5 out of 5

This one fell under the category of "A book at the bottom of my reading list."

I don't keep a list of books I don't want to read, so this one was literally on the bottom of my "to read" list. :)

Sadly, though, it really wasn't my favorite.

I really wanted to like it. It came highly recommended by a good friend of mine who has great taste in literature. But I really didn't care for it very much.

Honor herself was a pretty cool protagonist. A little Mary Sue-ish, maybe, but I liked that she was capable and smart and had the values to match her name.

The other characters, though, were very flat to me. If it weren't for the fact that many of them had ethnicity-specific names (Dominica Santos, Raoul Courvosier, Nikos Papadapolous, Hiro Yammada, etc), I wouldn't have been able to tell remember who was who.

The setting is scifi, which I usually really like. But the way Weber wrote it, there was just too much information too soon. The plot took forever to get going because he needed to pour out so many plot-relevant details beforehand.

The thing is, I like complicated plots and complex world building. My favorite series is Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive, for crying out loud. Have you SEEN how big and complex those books are?

But this one was so dense with fake scientific vernacular that took me forever to figure out. It felt like reading a physics textbook--tons of new words with very little context to explain it in simpler, applicable terms. I kept finding my eyes unfocusing and my attention wandering.

I mean, the explanations did the job right. By the climax, I knew what was at stake and I knew how all the equipment Honor was using worked, and it felt like a real victory in the end. The problem is, were this book not on my reading list, I never would have made it to the climax. I got so bored so early on that if this were something I'd just picked up from the library for fun, I would have given up on it. As it was, it took me nearly three weeks to get through it. Which is embarrassingly slow for me.

I want to give this series a chance because so many people love it, but for now I'm not hooked enough to pick up the sequels.