Book 2 of the "The Expanse." This one is about 600 pages and took me about a week and a half to get through which is honestly not too bad considering that there were a couple of days in there when I just wasn't doing much reading at all. It would appear that I can average about 100 pages a day pretty comfortably. I have a tendency to have a few days where I don't read at all and a few where I binge and can get in as many as 400 pages. If you assume that books average around 250 pages that get's me to about 12 books per month which is actually about what I manage when I'm having my best years for reading challenges.
Ok, enough navel gazing.
Caliban's War was a reread. It was the last book in the series that I managed to read before starting grad school. The rest of the series will be new ground. In Leviathan Wakes, the reader is locked into two primary points of view: James Holden and Detective Miller. In Caliban's War, there are four primary POV's: James Holden, Avasarala, Bobbie, and Prax. Holden and Miller were kind of two sides of the same coin which held the first book together despite its massive size and narrative scope. The four POV's in Caliban's War are much more diverse.
Holden is Holden and will always be Holden. He spends a large chunk of this volume in a sort of identity crisis as he processes living through the events of Leviathan Wakes but get's back snapped into himself by about the mid point of the book. He serves as a sort of point of continuity.
Avasarala is a delightfully foul mouthed under-secretary for the Earth based UN. She's a schemer and a manipulator. She is the sort of politician who is officially in a minor role yet wields a monstrous amount of power from behind the scene. Her POV is full of intrigue and power plays which I personally love. I also freely admit I love the sort of frisson of having a little old grandma type be so foul-mouthed and so powerful. She is so much more dynamic in the book than she is in the series although Agdashloo does a fantastic job bringing her to life. Her role in the story is an illustration of a massive bureaucracy with all of its factions in constant competition. She's a restraining force on the Earth government who opposes the more militant conflict driven factions. She gets betrayed which sends her off planet and on a course of intersection with Holden.
Bobbie is a Martian marine who is the sole survivor of the UN and Mars marine squads stationed on Ganymede. All the other marines are wiped out by a mysterious blue-glowing creature that can exist in a vacuum without a suit and has enormous strength. She becomes a political pawn that her Martian government wants to use in their negotiations with the Earth government. Unfortunately, Bobbie's insightful assessment that her government is lying to her throws her into the path of Avasarala which leads to an unlikely but fascinating collaboration between two characters who should be enemies. Her POV is full of direct action oriented scenes and quick decisions. She's naturally impatient with any kind of political game which provides a nice counter-point to Avasarala.
Prax is a botanist from Ganymede. In this novel full of action heroes, Prax is just a guy. He's a guy who's mixed up in everything because his daughter was kidnapped before the conflict on Ganymede through his home into chaos. He's brilliant and focused, but he's just a guy. His function in the narrative is to provide a contrast to the other characters and to be a plausible source to what are deeply technical insights into the protomolecule. This is the same protomolecule that drove the events of the first book and is is still and the center of the events swirling around the solar system.
Because of these vastly different POVs, this book has a much different feel to it than Leviathan Wakes. It ends up reading more like a court intrigue than an action story. I'm very much looking forward to the next volume of the series: Abbadon's Gate.
