Things I've Noticed: It's tough killing time before the next Song of Ice and Fire novel

Last year I read the five available novels of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series at the rate of one a month.  I took a couple breaks to spend a month watching season one and season two of the HBO adaption Game of Thrones, but even taking the time to read the connected novellas about Dunk and Egg, I reached the summer of 2013 entirely caught up on the series and hungry for more.

So I looked around and came across the book Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, a book of essays on the series either examining concepts or how the series has been adapted into different forms.

So far I'm about halfway through the book, so it should last me until later this year.

Also I'll take a month off of reading the book to watch season 3 when it comes out on DVD, and this month I got to read the related short story "The Princess and the Queen", in the collection Dangerous Women. 

After that I'm kind of out of luck…

But so far I'm okay!

School's Out!

With the exception of one remaining group assignment, I'm finished school for the term - classes are done, and I can now get myself back to the regular reading/watch/gaming schedule.

Right now reading means continuing my journey through A Song of Ice and Fire

Right now watching means I'm running through the last new episodes of most shows I've been watching and am finally getting to check out some movies I meant to see last year

Right now gaming means Little Big Planet: Karting - which is both silly and fun.

Now only 26 more days until I'm back in a new course!

Genre Character of the Week: Ser Duncan the Tall

Having finished A Game of Thrones earlier this week, but not willing to review it until after my next book club meeting, I moved on to the first novella written in the series, which takes place nearly a century earlier and follows the adventures ofSer Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg.

Duncan’s story is very similar to that of the film A Knight’s Tale in which a recently deceased Knight’s squire declares himself a knight and enters into tournaments to seek his fortune.  The novella was published in 1998 while the film (which I also loved) came out in 2001.

Considering that Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire saga is all about the shades of grey in fantasy, this story is pretty much a simple black vs. white story of a young man trying to do good with his life.  I totally loved it and a huge part of that comes down to the earnest, decent character of Dunk (known officially as Ser Duncan the Tall).

Whether you’ve read the main books or not, the novella is a fun, stand-alone story it took me a few hours to read and was totally worth every minute of it.

Things I've Noticed: There's this book called Game of Thrones

Right now I’m in the process of jumping on the bandwagon that is A Song of Ice and Fire – better known to the viewing public as Game of Thrones.  As I’ve said in the past, I believe that if I’m going ot go around and tell people I love the Fantasy genre, it is probably worth my while to explore the popular texts in the field because that it what I’ll get asked about by people on the bus, or in class, or at work.

So onto A Game of Thrones.

I was just starting High School when the first book in the series A Game of Thrones was released.  As High school kids don’t have a lot of cash it was probably in grade eleven when I started noticing a lot of my friends were reading the recently released paperback edition.  The cover (pictured right) showed a guy dressed in black sitting on a horse in a winter setting with a castle in the background and what appeared to be a fire burning some part of the building.  The cover looked exciting, my friends who were reading the book told me it was probably a hundred times better than the DragonLance stuff I was currently reading (probably due to the graphic sex and violence, we were teenaged boys after all), so I added it to my list of series I should get around to reading.

I picked up the book to read on Monday.

Now I’ll admit, after four sequels, a lot of awards and two seasons of an award winning HBO series, I’m probably coming to this pretty late, but at the very least I’m starting before the series is finished being written, which is something I usually never do, to avoid the curse of the Wheel of Time – a wretched state that has only released it’s hold on of my high school friends in the last few days.

Anyway, back to property damage (some mild 22-year-old spoilers follow), at one point early in the novel an assassination attempt is made using the burning of a castle’s library to draw attention away from the event.  Watching the library burn, the castle’s mistress Catelyn Stark, watched “…the smoke rise into the sky and thought sadly of all the books the Starks had gathered over the centuries.”  And you know what – I got pretty upset!  Even though this small library is purely fictional and even if it wasn’t it would not in anyway be available to me, I was still thinking: Come on!  Couldn’t you burn down some other part of the castle?  Why does it always have to be the library!

Then I realized I was getting pretty upset of the fictional destruction of a non-existent library collection and I realized two things.

1)     George R.R. Martin can really write – he totally sucked me in to the story.

And

2)     Any doubts that I’m in the wrong field of study have pretty much left the building.

So there you go – while reading a twenty-two year old fantasy novel I was able to reaffirm my career and professional goals – not bad at all.