Are the Honor Harrington books any good?

I'd wait more than twenty minutes before deciding that. Haven't read the books myself though.
 
I liked the early ones quite a bit, but they did get repetative after a while.

If you want to check for yourself, Baen has the first two or three in the series in electronic format at their free library section at www.baen.com. All of the others can be had off of the cds at baencd.thefifthimperium.com. Baen figures no one sane is going to try to read 17 books off of a computer screen, so they consider e-books to be cheap advertising.
 
Well worth it...

I have the whole series of Honor Harrington plus the all the anthologies of short stories and the two spin off novels.
The whole series is quite good and having read them repeatedly I do not find them repeating themselves at all. The whole series is more akin to the Horatio Hornblower series by CS Forester but with the sci-fi element. David Weber does quite a good job of explaining the actual physics behind his universe in every book and several books provide blueprints of the ships and/or appendices dealing with various issues. The amount of background material he provides, both in text, and as appendices is astounding and makes for a much more enjoyable read. Similar to reading the Wing Commander novels and playing the games. Both work alone quite well but are simply superb together. So it is here, the backgrounds and the short stories help add depth and flesh out past events and characters that just aren’t covered in detail in the books themselves.
Again, I recommend them quite highly. Just remember the series centers around the doings of just one character and her interactions with others. So most things told are from her perspective, this may be why one poster said it was somewhat repetitive.
 
a satisfying read, with some reservations.

political views of the author are very prominent, and can disagree with yours dramatically (I, for instance, don't get terribly excited when every liberal is portrayed as a weakling, every enemy politician a bastard and every Navy official a hero). the protagonist is a super woman, of course, with tungsten balls. if you prefer more thought and less propaganda, try L.M. Bujold's Vorkosigan series or Iain M. Banks's Culture series instead.

another issue is with space battles in HH series being thinly disguised naval battles :) broadsides, cannons, boarding hooks, avast, me hearties. don't try to find any WC-like similarities with airplane dogfights: nope, we've got battlecruisers and ships of the line here. oops, my bad: ships of the wall.

but really, HH is not the worst sci-fi you can find, and it's about space combat. characters even try to evolve when they survive from one book to another... doesn't make them any less 2D, but adds variety.
 
I read a few books from another series by the author and found them enjoyable. The last book was called the Shiva Option.. don't remember the titles of the other books in the series- but they're probably best read in order. They were full of large scale space combat mainly focused on capships, but the fighters occasionally play a crucial role. Not much dogfighting though, usually just fly in, fire, and fly back. I bought this series instead of Honor Harrington since it seemed to have more space fleet combat.

The first books were very enjoyable, but the last one (The Shiva Option) became monotonous after awhile since the ending became a forgone conclusion. The Wing Commander books were definitely more enjoyable, but if you've already read those, I think it's worth picking up a book or two.
 
I really enjoy the Honor books.

Everyone else has already explained them fairly well... they're Horatio Hornblower in space, often painfully literally (the leader of the French-Revolutionaries-in-space was actually named Rob S. Pierre at one point). A lot of people really like that, though, and it's also something common in the Wing Commander novels. I think the books are starting to suffer from the author's success... At All Costs could have used a much stronger editor.

I think they're worth reading, though. The series is a frequent topic among the #WingNut clique.

(If you like the age of sail in space, David Drake's Lt. Leary series and David Feintuch's Seafort books are also both enjoyable.)
 
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