BOOK REVIEW: Safehold Series -- Books 5 thru 9 (David Weber)
(Emoji Of A Wave - John Mayer)
It's possible that I'm a snob where it comes to books, and an impatient snob at that.
I don't want to have to work when I read books. I want the story handed to me in a way that's easy to wrap my mind around. I don't want to have to research something or go digging through appendices or indices every other page. It takes me out of the book itself, and out of the adventure that represents the whole reason why I started reading in the first place.
Perhaps that's expecting too much.
I started reading the Safehold books around a month and a half ago. The first major series is nine books long, and after I drilled through the first four books, I wrote my review, which I recommend you read before you go much farther. I'll be referencing quite a few things from it. You can find it here. Spoilers.
In brief, the premise of the second half of the Safehold books is much the same as the first. Merlin And Company are still trying to get what remains of humanity in fighting form so they can go and kick the Gbaba -- no, that's not a typo -- out of the galaxy. The only real obstacle they've faced thus far is the Church Of God Awaiting. That particular obstacle has persisted for the course of these nine books.
David Weber has too much time on his hands, and no concept of the fact that people other than himself might actually read his books. This is the only explanation that I can come up with to rationalize what he's done over these last nine novels. I compared the first four books to Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' in my first review, and I stand by that now. And now I'm going to make a pretty serious statement:
Everything that is bad about the first four books gets MUCH WORSE in the next five.
Now, I shall expound:
- Weber's sailing fetish grows only more aggrandized and out of control. Worse, he's not even fetishizing with relevant characters anymore. He's picking random naval events that have no overall bearing on the story and spending entire chapters on them. They're just 'day in the life' segments of his books filled with nothing but boating porn.
- What's worse than one fetish? TWO! Weber also clearly has a land combat fetish as well. Inevitably, the naval war that started in the first four books bleeds over onto the land, where -- and this is the really impressive thing -- Weber makes the whole thing EVEN WORSE. If you struggled through his boating fetish and actually took the time to learn what the hell he was on about, now you get to do that with land combat as well. And there is an entirely new cast of people you now have to learn to get to know, the vast majority of which are very, very temporary, so it's not worth the effort.
- Nothing new happens. Not really. Books 5-9 are full of 'wash, rinse, repeat'.
- Weber spends entirely too much time talking about shit that doesn't matter and spends NO TIME talking about important character development. There are two certain persons in the cast of principle characters who undergo two pretty massive changes, and the books spend no time talking about it. And they're probably the two most interesting characters in the entire books. Weber's choice to skip over this type of character development while simultaneously indulging in his boating and land war fetishes is criminal, and further evidence that Weber wrote these books for himself, not anyone else who might actually invest time in them.
- The goofy, misspelled, Scrabble word reject names of Webers just keep on coming. This is bad on its own, but Weber clearly -knows- it's annoying, and he keeps doing it to you anyway. He actually acknowledges it several times in the later books, this douchebaggery with names that he's so drawn towards.
Perhaps the most damning thing that I can say about these books is that you can -easily- skip huge portions of them without it affecting your understanding of the plot in any meaningful way. Weber's agonizing tendency to regurgitate everything at several points throughout each book is a massive waste of time and ink and also a guarantee that you can literally skip WHOLE CHAPTERS without actually missing a thing. If the chapter doesn't involve one of the principles, you can safely ignore it.
"But Steve," you cry, "If you're not reading the sections, how do you know what you are and are not missing?" That's a perfectly valid question. The answer is simple: My wife is also reading these books, and we talk about them frequently. She -is- reading all of the books from end to end, and has confirmed that, no, I'm not missing a damn thing.
So here we are at the end of the review, and there's only one real question left. If they're so bad, why the hell did I read through nine of them? The answer is irritatingly simple, and one that I touched on at the end of my last review. While at least half -- AT LEAST -- of every one of these books is pointless, the other half is solid gold. The premise behind the books is compelling, and there's clearly been a great deal of thought put into the development of what is a VERY thoroughly realized world.
I hate that these books make me dig. I hate that the author had a very easy job to do and he somehow managed to cock it up this bad. I hate that some of his writing is so excellent and that I've been too interested in the primary story arc to simply walk away from them until now.
Until now.
There's at least one more book in this series, 'Through Fiery Trials" but I won't be reading it. My patience with Weber is spent. Do I regret spending the time on these nine books? No. Would I recommend them to someone else?
Not without a big damn warning.
It's possible that I'm a snob where it comes to books, and an impatient snob at that.
I don't want to have to work when I read books. I want the story handed to me in a way that's easy to wrap my mind around. I don't want to have to research something or go digging through appendices or indices every other page. It takes me out of the book itself, and out of the adventure that represents the whole reason why I started reading in the first place.
Perhaps that's expecting too much.
I started reading the Safehold books around a month and a half ago. The first major series is nine books long, and after I drilled through the first four books, I wrote my review, which I recommend you read before you go much farther. I'll be referencing quite a few things from it. You can find it here. Spoilers.
In brief, the premise of the second half of the Safehold books is much the same as the first. Merlin And Company are still trying to get what remains of humanity in fighting form so they can go and kick the Gbaba -- no, that's not a typo -- out of the galaxy. The only real obstacle they've faced thus far is the Church Of God Awaiting. That particular obstacle has persisted for the course of these nine books.
David Weber has too much time on his hands, and no concept of the fact that people other than himself might actually read his books. This is the only explanation that I can come up with to rationalize what he's done over these last nine novels. I compared the first four books to Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' in my first review, and I stand by that now. And now I'm going to make a pretty serious statement:
Everything that is bad about the first four books gets MUCH WORSE in the next five.
Now, I shall expound:
- Weber's sailing fetish grows only more aggrandized and out of control. Worse, he's not even fetishizing with relevant characters anymore. He's picking random naval events that have no overall bearing on the story and spending entire chapters on them. They're just 'day in the life' segments of his books filled with nothing but boating porn.
- What's worse than one fetish? TWO! Weber also clearly has a land combat fetish as well. Inevitably, the naval war that started in the first four books bleeds over onto the land, where -- and this is the really impressive thing -- Weber makes the whole thing EVEN WORSE. If you struggled through his boating fetish and actually took the time to learn what the hell he was on about, now you get to do that with land combat as well. And there is an entirely new cast of people you now have to learn to get to know, the vast majority of which are very, very temporary, so it's not worth the effort.
- Nothing new happens. Not really. Books 5-9 are full of 'wash, rinse, repeat'.
- Weber spends entirely too much time talking about shit that doesn't matter and spends NO TIME talking about important character development. There are two certain persons in the cast of principle characters who undergo two pretty massive changes, and the books spend no time talking about it. And they're probably the two most interesting characters in the entire books. Weber's choice to skip over this type of character development while simultaneously indulging in his boating and land war fetishes is criminal, and further evidence that Weber wrote these books for himself, not anyone else who might actually invest time in them.
- The goofy, misspelled, Scrabble word reject names of Webers just keep on coming. This is bad on its own, but Weber clearly -knows- it's annoying, and he keeps doing it to you anyway. He actually acknowledges it several times in the later books, this douchebaggery with names that he's so drawn towards.
Perhaps the most damning thing that I can say about these books is that you can -easily- skip huge portions of them without it affecting your understanding of the plot in any meaningful way. Weber's agonizing tendency to regurgitate everything at several points throughout each book is a massive waste of time and ink and also a guarantee that you can literally skip WHOLE CHAPTERS without actually missing a thing. If the chapter doesn't involve one of the principles, you can safely ignore it.
"But Steve," you cry, "If you're not reading the sections, how do you know what you are and are not missing?" That's a perfectly valid question. The answer is simple: My wife is also reading these books, and we talk about them frequently. She -is- reading all of the books from end to end, and has confirmed that, no, I'm not missing a damn thing.
So here we are at the end of the review, and there's only one real question left. If they're so bad, why the hell did I read through nine of them? The answer is irritatingly simple, and one that I touched on at the end of my last review. While at least half -- AT LEAST -- of every one of these books is pointless, the other half is solid gold. The premise behind the books is compelling, and there's clearly been a great deal of thought put into the development of what is a VERY thoroughly realized world.
I hate that these books make me dig. I hate that the author had a very easy job to do and he somehow managed to cock it up this bad. I hate that some of his writing is so excellent and that I've been too interested in the primary story arc to simply walk away from them until now.
Until now.
There's at least one more book in this series, 'Through Fiery Trials" but I won't be reading it. My patience with Weber is spent. Do I regret spending the time on these nine books? No. Would I recommend them to someone else?
Not without a big damn warning.
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