Book Review - Old Man's War

On Sunday night I finished John Scalzi's Old Man's War. This was a great book!

Description from the book jacket:

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's
grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The
bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight
for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.So: we
fight. To defend Earth (a target for our new enemies, should we let them get
close enough) and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from
Earth, the war has gone on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the
hands of the Colonial Defense Force, which shields the home planet from too much
knowledge of the situation. What's known to everybody is that when you reach
retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want
people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken
off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve your time at the front. And
if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one
of our hard-won colony planets.

John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to
expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than
he can imagine-and what he will become is far stranger.

This was a very interesting book! I found it to be highly entertaining and funny. It's about war, so characters die left right and center. Usually this disturbs me as I get attached to characters. But, it's written in such a way that you just accept it. Despite the graphic descriptions of battles, nothing is too graphic. It's graphic in the right way, if you get that.

It's obviously a Science Fiction book, one of my two favorite kinds! I read this book in less than a week, which is saying something as I have many obligations and two little kids at home. If you like Sci-Fi at all, you HAVE to read this book. Thanks Amanda, for introducing it to me, and letting me borrow it. At the rate I'm going I'm going to need to add many more books to my Spring Reading Thing list, as I'm consuming the ones I have on it at an incredable pace. I'm 2/3 of the way through Twilight, it's Tuesday at 11:48 AM and I started that book on Sunday night at 9 PM.