Finished a 10th book!

I finished reading Starcraft: Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg tonight. Basically it's a novelization of the Zerg missions from the game, plus some of the Protoss missions.

Overall I'd say it could've been better. There were inconsistencies, plus one major typo ("whole" instead of "hole"), that could've been fixed if it had gone through another revision pass or two. Things like the MC, Jim Raynor, deciding at length all the reasons why not to tell his men something, and then a few chapters later they have a conversation that sounds like he'd already told them and it went without any issues. That happened at least a couple times. Then there were a couple places where the author went into lengthy exposition that could've just been cut out entirely - the kinds of things I might write into a rough draft to explain a character motivation as a note to myself for later. Some of the characters were wildly inconsistent too. And finally, I'm not sure the MC he picked was really the best viewpoint character for the story. Mostly he went around watching other characters doing things to each other, while being fairly useless himself. Also, the plausibility for how exactly he was set up was kind of weak - he wanders off alone in the mountains spying on the other characters while he has 51 underlings doing nothing important, for example. He was also unrealistically quick to accept situations that should've pissed him off for a lot longer.

Also, Kerrigan (the main villain) was kind of 2D and cliche. Down to the maniacal laughter, tantrums, and dramatic speeches about doom and gloom.

Of course, it probably didn't help that the storyline was fairly constrained by what other people had already written into the game. There were events that had to happen in it, in the same way that it happened in the game. In a lot of ways, the first half of the book probably wouldn't catch the interest of anyone who wasn't already familiar with the story, because it's really too weak to stand alone.

However, there were also a lot of really good parts, especially in the back half. The Protoss really came to life. I really enjoyed reading the parts after Raynor, Tassadar, and Zeratul all came together against Kerrigan. There were some really great character interaction scenes there.

The story doesn't really have a solid conclusion to it, though again that was by necessity due to staying canon to the storyline. Lots of loose ends stayed loose. No clue what happened to Kerrigan at the end, if you don't already know the story in advance. I guess the uninitiated would just have to wait for the next novelization to get published.

Meanwhile, I think I've figured out why I don't read as much as I used to. Physically speaking, it actually takes a lot out of me. There doesn't seem to be a reading position in existence where I don't eventually become completely stiff and sore - and if I do my preferred method of wanting to read an entire book in one sitting, that means I rotate positions until eventually my entire body is stiff and sore. I recovered from that a lot faster when I was a spry young'n ... but not so much anymore, alas.