After what seems like forever, I have finally finished The Gunslinger. Kevin put me onto the book shortly after I finished The Fall of Reach. Wow, almost three full months to finish a 231-page book. That’s just sad, considering the big print and large margins of each page.

This is my first novel by Steven King, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I intend on completing this series, so my next purchase will be The Drawing of the Three. I chose not to continue with the Halo series because I’ve been told that the second novel is very weak.

While reading this book, I found myself gripped by every story the gunslinger told about his past, but was bored to tears with the details of his quest for the man in black. I eagerly awaited the next story he would tell to whomever would listen, be it a lonely farmer in a corn field or a boy stranded in the middle of the desert. Every story he told recollecting his past built up the character of the gunslinger and endeared me to him. However, if he spoke about the devil grass that grew in the desert one more time, I would have tossed the book out of the window of the bus that I take to work and back.

I didn’t harass Nadia with one single detail of the story.

I received the Halo-based novel The Fall of Reach a few weeks ago as a gift.

It is the first novel that I’ve read in many years, and I enjoyed it immensely. I started off reading very slowly, covering about 11 pages in an hour. By the time I finished the book, I was able to cover three times as many in the same amount of time (I’m not sure if that is fast, but it is very fast for me). I only read on the bus to work and back, so it took me a few weeks to complete it.

Now that I’m done, I’m positive that Bungie created the game first, then Eric Nylund wrote wrote the novel. I say this because there are a few minor inconsistancies between the stories. One of the bigger ones deals with the Master Chief’s powers. In the game, MC can jump high and take an unbelievable amount of punishment in terms of plasma bursts and grenades, and that’s about it. The Master Chief Nylund wrote about is capable of so much more. Amazing feats of hand-to-hand techniques, stealth, and speed show that SPARTAN-117 is more than just a gun jocky. So much so that I’d like to see an off-shoot of the current Halo series of games, perhaps with a Splinter Cell-esque engine, that shows off what the Chief can really do.

Playing DOA4 with SPARTAN-458 is now so much cooler to me, knowing that they are really taught to be that brutal with their hands and feet, and not just know how to shoot well.

I fired up the original Halo to play through the first level to see what little tidbits from the book I could pick up. There were a couple, like mentioning the planet Reach, executing the Cole Protocol, and Captain Keyes holding on to his smoking pipe. It was very obvious that the game started exactly where the book left off.

I intend picking up and reading the next two novels in the series, The Flood and First Strike, once I am done with The Chronicles of Riddick.

Being done with this book must come as some relief to Nadia, as I will no longer need to harass her with “fun facts” from the world of Halo. She won’t again have to hear “You know what’s cool about Master Chief?” or other such questions; until I start the next book, that is.