So I powered through the first four books of the Expanse series as quickly as I can recall book-reading in the past. I got through the first four books of the Harry Potter series in about two weeks back when I first started plowing through them; I think I might've gotten through all of the Expanse books even more quickly than that. My Kindle records show that I bought the first book on July 20th, the second on July 22nd (!), the third on July 27, and the fourth on July 30th. These aren't exactly short books (2300 pages between the four of them), and I'm a busy guy, so hopefully it says something to their readability that I managed to get through them all at such a pace.

It's interesting to read well-done hard sci-fi, especially in a relatively low-tech setting like the Expanse books. There aren't any warp drives or phasers or teleporters here; everything is pretty tightly constrained to the laws of relativistic or newtonian physics. Passengers on ships without thrust deal with the inconveniences of zero-gravity; radiation is still something that needs to be worried about; individuals brought up on Mars or in the asteroid belt are effectively prevented from ever visiting Earth due to the crush of its gravity well. Obviously there are narrative hiccups here and there (how many times can Amos appear to be dead at the end of a chapter, only to find himself miraculously fine when the action returns to him?), and the last couple of books indulge in the villain-of-the-week kind of Star Trekianisms that I was hoping the authors were better than. Still, the books managed to be compulsively readable.

Not to overstate the import of these books; they're mostly fluff, but sometimes a bit of fluff is all you really want out of a good three-hour reading session. These books aren't exactly Kim Stanley Robinson novels, but then, that's probably a good thing: KSR's where I turn for Serious Business, and sometimes I just want to read something that keeps me clicking the next page button. The Expanse books are definitely that. Sorry if I'm not being specific w/r/t plot or anything like that; if you think this sounds like something you'd be interested in, feel free to grab a Kindle sample and go to town.

Anyone read their Honor Among Thieves Star Wars book? It looks like it's around half the length of an Expanse novel, which doesn't strike me as an awesome deal.