[[2026 Books and Manga]]  I dunno what posessed me to grab this. I guess I wanted something light to start off 2026.[^1] But I ended up enjoying the book quite a lot. I have barely any experience with **Halo** and have only finished the first game. I’m also bad at the multiplayer. On top of all that I didn’t really get what was going on in that first game at all. All I could gather was that the aliens were bad, Master Chief was cool, the gameplay was popping, and Cortana was the epitome of female character design in video games. **The Fall of Reach** fills in all the contextual gaps, to the point that it got me invested in getting into the series this year — both the games and novels. It’s cool getting an understanding of who (or what) John-117 actually is, and how bad the Covenant have actually been. Maybe that context *is* in **Halo 1**, but it was also my first ever **FPS**, so I was experiencing sensory overload trying to figure it all out after a decade of [[JRPG|JRPGs]] and basically nothing else. The writing is a bit dry at times — though I can give writer Eric Nylund some grace here, he apparently wrote the novel in *seven weeks* which is fucking unreal to me. But that dryness made it pretty easy to get into. I have a lot of trouble starting a novel for some reason, but once I’m a chapter in, I usually blitz through it. I finished the **Reach** novel in a day, thanks to an easy to digest intro where Chief and a bunch of Spartans do cool shit. I’m eager to check out the rest of the books and games. I’ve heard some of the later ones are even better. [^1]: in terms of writing complexity, not the actual content, lol