mostly harmless books

(Ok, I admit, I am shamelessly trying to get more books from the www.nemira.ro promotion. So sue me. I did read the books so I might as well get something if that’s possible. And books are the best prizes! Also, since most of the things I can pick are (hard) SF, it will make some of my friends happy that I’m not reading “fairy tales” anymore :P Writter for Scrie ca sa primesti… o carte.)

But this isn’t going to be another raving review about how GRRM is the best thing since Tolkien and how he singlehandedly changed the face of fantasy and blah blah. It’s going to be more of a “why I didn’t like A Song of Ice and Fire at first”.

I’d been hearing about the books for ages. Wow, amazing, brilliant, best fantasy cycle ever etc., but I didn’t read them until my friend Horia sent me his copies. Needless to add that given all the praise I’d been hearing, I was expecting to love the story. What I got was confusion. Lots of.

The prologue was ok. Things happen, blood, people die. I managed to figure out who was who and… the characters dissapeared from the story. Back to square one.

The good thing is that GRRM does the main characters brilliantly. My favorites are Arya and Jon and I hope they don’t get killed off in book 6 or something, or I’ll be one pissed of Jen. However, all the billions of secondary characters and all the ancient kings with the same name and all the unending details about who and what armor is wearing and all the political plots… aaargh! That almost killed the story for me. I honestly don’t give a damn about the endless descriptions. I can imagine a character, but I don’t give a fuck what he’s wearing. And politics bore me in general, but I can take them in moderate doses.

I think I only started to enjoy the book in the last quarter, when things starting to clear up. But a couple of hundred pages is a bit too long for that, and if the book wasn’t so incredibly hyped I would’ve given up loong ago. What kept me going was… well, the fact that GRRM is smart. He gives you one little clue to make you curious then switches POV and you’re left hanging, so of course you have to read on - even through the boring chapters. Dany and Jon and Tyrion and especially the hope I’d learn more about the Others kept me going. The world beyond the Wall is much more fascinating to me than the politics of Westeros.

And, after bashing the book so much, what do I have to say? Well, I devoured the next 3 volumes, to the point when I was on a plane and I was hoping it wouldn’t land before I found out what happened to Arya, so something must’ve worked to get me hooked.. The downside of all the details is that almost 2 years after reading the books my mind is blank and I can only remember the very basics of the plot… thank God for internet summaries :)

What do you do if you have to spend 27 hours on a train. Stare out the window; talk to people; read; listen to music. Staring gets boring after a while, I liked the sound of the train better than any music, and the woman in my compartment was nice, but only knew Russian and a couple of words in Romanian and English. So I read.

I had been looking forward to Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse for about a year, so I had really high hopes. Too high, apparently. No, it’s not a bad anthology by all means, but it didn’t blow me away either.
(more…)