Reading Safehold aloud [SPOILERS!!!]

I just read Safehold books 1 through 10 to my wife, reading about a few sections of a chapter a night from early July to January. It's my second time through, her first.

Some observations:

I really missed a lot when I read it myself the first time. I believe I tend to skim swaths of text that are expository in nature, whereas reading every single word aloud makes you digest 100% of the information in the book.

Weber's literary skills are excellent. His sentences are challenging because he uses very few commas, which required me often to reread a sentence when I discovered I had placed emphasis on the wrong words and didn't catch the meaning.

His frequent use of alliteration is a real tongue twister. Try reading it aloud - it's not for the faint of heart.

We both started to catch on to David's pattern of what we call "Red shirt backstory." He spends a up to a full page and a half giving background to characters who are about to die. He does this without fail. It is impressive how he's able to manufacture backstories using fictional situations from fictional locales and do it with such convincing texture. It does get a bit tiresome after a while.

Nahrman's death aggravated my wife. She was rather fond of the 'portly prince,' the 'little rotund Emeraldian,' and she chuckled every time Weber never failed to mention that he is chubby. "We get it, David, he's fat!" she would say, laughing. She maintains that killing Nahrman was a mistake by Weber. Could be that Weber realized it himself, which is why he brought him back.

The bizarre spelling of names is a real pain. Not so much for those reading to themselves, but out loud it becomes a real challenge. Most of the time I can make out the normal pronunciation of the name but sometimes it's not a normal name at all, and I would stop and try to figure out how it should be pronounced, and I did this so often my wife would just say, "doesn't matter, just make up a name and keep going!" She's such a team player.

The hardback editions I possess gradually revealed more typos and outright errors as the volumes progressed. The publisher really didn't proofread as well in the later books. Sometimes it's not just a typo, but the wrong name inserted into the sentence. I had to correct it frequently in books 8-10. Once during a part that involved the Wylsynns, the actual name 'Wilson' was inserted. Somebody missed that one.

Overall, the story is so compelling that my wife, who isn't into sci fi, daily would ask what time we're going to read. Safehold has the potential to achieve legendary status. I just hope Weber finishes it. If he doesn't, my wife has made it clear to me that she will hunt him down.

fossten wrote:I just read Safehold books 1 through 10 to my wife, reading about a few sections of a chapter a night from early July to January. It's my second time through, her first.
SNIP .

I've been reading to my older grown up daughter for over a year now currently on some of Alexander McCall Smiths books.. so I'm with you on this - it is enjoyable

I'm no good at different voices, so I just plow on. what do you do about portraying differrent characters?

I read through the series once and have a tendency to skip over alot of the military detail but do notice the patterns you mention.

I've listened to the whole series in audio form though and every narrator has his own take on voices and pronunciation. Emerald was definitely Irish in the first couple books. In ATSOT, the narrator or producer glitches. Every time they mention the south Harchong capitol, they repeated it three times. So and so in yu-kwou yu-kwou yu-kwou....it was entertaining.

It also made me wonder. Would Harchong actually have Asian accents? They all speak different dialects of English right? And where did the Asian names even come from when the whole world seemed to be all old Euro-centric names?

Himself did explain the survival of the Han-form names, although I'm not having any luck turning up the reference: China held sufficient weight in the councils of the mighty that it could extract a promise of the preservation of as much as possible of its culture among the [sizable] portion of the colonists of east Asian origin in return for signing off on the massive expenditure of resources needed for Operation Ark. What's not at all clear is why neither Africa nor south & southeast Asia had similar pull.

Of course, it's entirely possible that they did - and what we see is another result of Langhorne's little rewrite of the mission spec. In which case, he and Bedard once again demonstrated their profound knowledge of history. The suspiciously rapid coalescence of the Harchong Empire suggests they succumbed to the delusion of China as an ancient, stable, unchanging culture, with the elite standing tall on the backs of long-suffering peasants and built that into the "Chinese" colonist memory package, while wiping any traces of any other non-Western cultures that were supposed to survive. And they did a rather good job of it, at that, although it's surprising the dynasty held on this long: what we're seeing in Harchong now is pretty much an exact replay of the collapse of at least 4 great Chinese dynasties - Chin, Later Han, Yuan and Ming, + probably a couple more I'm forgetting - complete with the peasant-turned-warlord ruler of the successor state. That longevity is probably due to the Church's work keeping a lid on things once the hierarchy opted for power over morality and ethics.

Miracle Mechanic wrote: < snip >

It also made me wonder. Would Harchong actually have Asian accents? They all speak different dialects of English right? And where did the Asian names even come from when the whole world seemed to be all old Euro-centric names?