#5 Platform - Cordelia's Honor

The longest unread book in my current inventory, and it's two books in one.

Books 23 and 24: Cordelia's Honor (Shards of Honor and Barrayar)
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Provenance: Bought at a Barnes and Noble in Tacoma on recommendation of damienroc... before I moved to Tokyo in 2002

Having let this book languish on my shelf for years and years, I sorta regret not reading it sooner; mostly, I did it because bannoubunkacoby lent me the second omnibus, and I felt I should read the one I owned first. I do think it helps to start at the chronological beginning in many cases, if you can.

The plot arc goes over the two novels in this edition, anyway, so reading them together in the omnibus worked quite well; I find space opera usually works best read in rapid succession, anyway. The first book, Shards of Honor, follows a Betan survey captain over the course of a couple of missions that don't go quite the way they're supposed to, and her meetings with an enemy captain/admiral that have a lot of impact on her life. The second, Barrayar, has much more in the way of political machinations and such on that planet, with rich themes of becoming a parent and views of romance underneath.

The two books weren't written back to back, and it shows; the writing isn't as crisp in Shards of Honor, nor is the plotting quite as tight, but the characters are already very strong, and it was still a quite enjoyable read. Barrayar was a delightful fast read, though; the characters there really drew me in, and the story was very interesting. I like machinations quite a lot, really.

Anyway, this is worth reading, I'd say, if you enjoy the genre at all. It's the start of a fairly long series, but these are self-contained enough, you could stop here if you wanted and not feel left out.

Next up: Young Miles. Just to show, I'm not following my advice in that previous paragraph about stopping.