Sunday, July 10, 2011
THE LONGEST-AWAITED SEQUEL SINCE CHINESE DEMOCRACY: It is a testament to how unpredictable an author is that one cannot even identify the characters in the latest installment of his series without spoiling for a significant portion of his audience. So with the HBO initiates still catching up on Game of Thrones and its sequels, I'm not going to say a single thing about what I understand is coming up in So You Think You Can Dance with Dragons, which is coming to your Kindle on Tuesday, except that Salon loved it. Warning: the Salon article is light on details but does identify some of the main characters, so if you don't want to know who isn't dead, don't read.
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Last night, I woke up to at about 3:00 to take care of some business and thought -- gosh, I'll just read one more chapter of Book 2: Clash of Kings -- and stayed up until 7:00 to polish off the last half of the book. In related news, Theon Greyjoy is kind of a putz.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading the series since getting an ARC (Advance Readers Copy) of A Game of Thrones, way back in the Summer of 1996, and have gotten every subsequent book on release day. By ~2001 I had raved about the series to many friends who had also gotten into the story. Three of them now make it a point to blame me...not GRRM...for the delays in the series, as I was the pusher. I'm grateful for this day finally coming as, at least for the next 12 months, I'll be off the hook. My bigger question is if I am actually going to read ADoD right now or not? I'm strongly considering instead re-reading the series from the beginning, which I have never done. From reading the reviews of the show (I haven't seen it, waiting for DVD) I suspect it woudl be valuable. I remember the broad strokes, and many of the characters, but I'm sure I'll miss a lot of context if I don't reread.
ReplyDeleteI thought Theon was the best example of getting a completely different understanding of a character once you've got his POV chapters. In AGOT he seems like an OK guy, maybe kind of moody and standoffish. Once you get his POV in CoK, however, you discover he's a moody, standoffish sociopath.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if at some point we'll get a remixed version of Feast for Crows and Dance With Dragon, where Martin reintegrates the chapters in chronological order, kind of like "The Godfather Saga." One of the reasons he split it apart in the first place was because it couldn't be bound correctly at that length, which isn't a problem with an ebook.
ReplyDeleteI'm just starting Storm of Swords and I don't find the overlap particularly distracting. That said, if the HBO Series goes the distance, as I imagine it will, there will probably be a large enough market for all sorts of versions.
ReplyDeleteOh, thanks a lot, Isaac. As someone who hasn't yet read any of the books or seen even a minute of the HBO miniseries, it's totally ruined now that I know that one or more people die. Plus now I know it has more than one main character, and so it's not a kind of soliloquy thing. Way to spoil everything for me, Space-jerk.
ReplyDeleteIf we get past season 3 of the HBO series, I suspect that we'll have to see some kind of reintegration chronologically. A Storm of Swords (which I'm currently rereading) is far too long to fit into a 10 episode season. But it could be split into two seasons (there's a particularly apt place about 2/3 of the way through), with the first bits of the AFfC/DwD chronology.
ReplyDeleteI'm considering a re-read as well, since I honestly can't remember what happened in the 3rd book, and I never bothered to read the 4th, knowing the 5th was so far off in the distance. So, maybe I pick up GoT again, and I'll be all done with the 4th just as the paperback comes out next year? That'd be handy.
ReplyDeleteThis is so very true.
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