A while back I solicited recommendations for some new reading material. I'd just finished reading Thomas Pynchon's V, which was difficult and, I thought, pretentious, and ultimately unsatisfying, so I asked for something fun and easy to read, preferably science fiction, since I hadn't read anything in that genre in a while. Several people recommended Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, with this book as a good starting point. I looked into it a bit, finding that the series is well-regarded—indeed, various stories in its collection have won four Hugos and two Nebulas—as well as quite extended. I then more or less forgot about it for the next year and a half.

Earlier this month, as so often happens around this time of year, I found myself with some Borders gift cards that I'd received for Christmas and a reading list that had inexplicably grown over the past year. (I read 14 books in 2009, and probably heard about 20 or so that caught my interest.) Consequently, my nightstand got more cluttered and my lunchbreaks got more interesting. Also a little longer. Anyway, one of the books I picked up this year was, as you might guess, this one. Cordelia's Honor comprises the first book in the Vorkosigan series, Shards of Honor, and its sequel, Barrayar, which were, somewhat interestingly, not written consecutively—Barrayar was, from what I can tell, actually the eighth book written in the series. It's actually a little surprising to me that the two novels were written so far apart, because there's such a strong continuity between the two, and the style seems identical. Reading them together it feels almost more like one continuous novel than two separate works.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, though. What did I actually think of these books? Well, they were easy to read and fun, so on that level they were successful. But I can't quite decide whether or not I thought they were good. I found myself a little... annoyed isn't quite the right word, but perhaps a little disbelieving at some of the characters' motivations and behaviors—people kept having personal interludes at what seemed like really inappropriate times, and often the characters just didn't feel very natural to me. And there was a lot of what felt like social commentary from the author, but presented in a way that felt kind of clumsy to me. On the other hand, I found the story compelling enough that I finished it in just over a week and a half, and am finding myself very much interested in continuing the series. And although it struck me as a bit silly at times, the setting and characters seem to resonate with me in ways similar to the way that David Eddings' Belgariad did when I was a kid or the way the Horatio Hornblower books did more recently.

In a lot of ways, reading this series was like slipping into a well-worn pair of jeans or some nicely broken-in sneakers. It was comfortable and maybe kind of comforting. So I guess I'll be picking up the next omnibus, Young Miles, at some point. I have to chip away a bit at that stack on my nightstand first, though.

Started: 2010-01-04 | Finished: 2010-01-15

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