Bribery

“Before he lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarley did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into the other.” Truth.

5.14 A Feast for Crows

I came to the A Song of Fire and Ice series late.  I discovered it through a New Yorker article about how impatient George RR Martin’s fans are becoming for him to finish the series, and many fretting over the fact that he may die before he manages it.  I was amazed by the article and asked my brother who is a huge Fantasy fan if he had read the books.  He hadn’t… three weeks later he had and he was hooked.  So I decided to delve in. 

I have made no secret of the fact that I have grown tired of the new trilogy/series fad.  Mostly because I think it leads to over written ideas that really don’t need to be dragged out, and after finishing book four of the series I have hit true fatigue.  As I read, my attention wandered away from the story more often than not and I kept thinking that while I understand that Martin has created a world and characters that he loves, and I can understand why he wants to see where they may go and what they may do, that in the end I bet it was a pretty simple story he intended to tell.  I imagine that when he wrote that first book he knew how it all would end, but then got lost in all the planning and imagining and thus we end up with (supposedly) seven books that will, once complete, still bookend that same simple story line.  Is that a bad thing?  No necessarily.  He is a great writer and people love the books so have at it.  I just hope it finishes up at some point for those fans.

By the way, I had to bribe myself to finish this book with promising myself the purchase of the only book I have been really, really excited about in a long while. Very excited.