Originally Posted by Eulalios
Also still trying to finish (and have to re-download) a free book written in around 1900 about a contemporaneous (fictional) cattle drive up out of Mexico into South Dakota.
If you're interested in Southwestern cattle drives and the culture around that, or just looking for a good Western book in general, I'd strongly recommend Tough Trip Through Paradise by Andrew Garcia. This is an autobiography of sorts, written by a frontiersman and former cattle rustler who made a living as a hunter, trapper and drifter in the Montana wilderness.

Much of the book deals with his gradual separation from white culture and his slow integration into Indian life. Tough, honest, very grim in places, an excellent look at the Montana frontier in the late 1870s. Definitely worth a read.

Originally Posted by Kudaku
...but the main character. My God. ...He sucks at literally everything he tries to do (navigation, commanding, leadership, gunship piloting, physics, math, marriage), constantly lashes out at literally anyone around him for his own inadequacies and then apologizes 30 seconds later....

I'm on book 3 right now because I'm desperately hoping it's gonna turn around.
Not really, I'm sorry to say.

The books are modeled on (that is, shameless ripoffs of) the Horatio Hornblower novels, which are classics and much better done. I didn't realize that when I first started reading the Hope novels. As you've already noted, the main character advances in rank, but still remains much as you see him now. I dropped the series after about four books, I think. Feintuch's characterizations are extremely shallow in places--most places--and after several books the series wore very thin indeed.

Originally Posted by warty goblin
I think that stuff like the grimmer bits of Game of Thrones or similar are essentially a reminder that bad things happen.
For my part, I don't need reminding of this; I'm aware of it every day. And if this is Martin's only point, there are other ways to deliver it without reveling in the results.

For me, especially with Season Three, there's been a growing frustration with the deliberate emotional manipulation involved. He's developing characters just to shock you when they're unexpectedly killed.

I guess the question for me is whether there's anything in the later books that would remotely justify my caring about Season Four. There are still several characters I more or less enjoy, and would like to follow; but it's not worth it to me if Martin can't do more with them than devise convoluted ways of eventually killing them off.