FINALLY. 

Good eye, John!  I look forward to buying this.

Now for my dumb question: Which one is gray team again?

... I do enjoy when lurkers come out of there hole to answer questions : )

Be sure to read all the ones by Eric Nylund:
First Strike
Fall of Reach
Ghosts of Onyx

The other two (am I missing any?), The Flood, and Contact Harvest IMO can be skipped over. Both have their good points (you learn a buttload about the Covenant in Contact Harvest), but aren't nearly as good as the ones Nylund wrote.

And DaKiller, make sure you read them in order:

The Fall of Reach
The Flood (if you want to, but it was actually very good except for the parts that you already played in the first game  )
First Strike

Ghosts of Onyx
Contact Harvest


Hey everyone! HALO Uprising #3 is due out this week! Yeah!

Tehehehe. Teh suckage.
You're kidding me, right? Seriously they are now just releasing the third of the four comic books that explained what happened between Halo 2 and Halo 3? What the heck!?

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

And agreeing with Totemo (again), I'm very skeptical about this author. Why not let Nylund do it the way it is supposed to be (as of now anyway).

I burned through all of the Halo books in about 3 days. Each one took about 3 days, that is.
You know, Staten might be like me insofar as usually if I have to pull something out of my ass like an essay or some other paper, its usually pretty good, but if I have time to do it properly and try to improve upon it, it just gets messy and much worse than it was. Or, conversely, if I'm working on an idea for years, and have time to improve upon it to the point where it is really good, that works as well. Halo 1 was re-created from scratch after years of toying around with it in 5 months. So he either had to pull a new storyline out of his ass or he'd been developing it for 3 years. In Halo 2 he wasn't quite as rushed, so he probably wrote up a great storyline like Halo 1, and then decided he wanted to throw in stuff about the covenant and make it all convoluted.
Halo 3, IMO was a disaster of a storyline. I mean just awful in terms of the "epic" feeling the game utterly failed at. The pacing of the story was abominable, and the plot arcs in the game kept jerking the player in a  new direction at exactly the WRONG moment. They listened to the fans complaining that Halo 2 wasn't all about Master Chief, except Joe forgot that he had introduced new characters in Halo 2 that had plotlines of their own that tied in with the main story in a big way. I mean, how DID Amanda Keyes and Sgt. Johnson and the Arbiter get back to earth? Last we saw of them they're on Delta Halo and suddenly they're back on earth at the start of the next game. Oh right, he left that to Halo: Uprising, as if that'll cover those details. The only thing I liked about Halo 3's story was the ending, but getting there was a ripe mess.
And then in Contact Harvest, he seems to have ignored all the work done by Eric Nylund, as his version of what happened on Harvest differs GREATLY from Nylund's version. There were ways to make the story fit in with the other version and still make it not just good, but pretty badass. The book glaringly highlight's Staten's extraordinary lack of sense and understanding of continuity, and makes known the reason why Halo 3's story was so bad.

Wait...I didn't know Nylund even told a story of Harvest, other than brief little snippets from what was briefed to the Spartans. He didn't exactly go into great detail on it. Still, I don't think I can bring myself to finish Staten's book. I guess I'll have to force myself. 

Also, Harvest went silent and no one knew why, which was the reason the first small battlegroup was sent in to investigate (discovering the Covenant ship).  Not a message from an AI or an ONI diplomatic shuttle bringing a warning of alien invaders.

My sig shows my "likeness" for Contact Harvest. Read it and weep.