Sunday 27th
May
During
the odd idle moment, I have been reading book reviews. There is a lot of comment on the internet
about Game of Thrones, which is both
a weighty book (over 900 pages…) and a lavish TV series. It is receiving rave reviews, and the still
photos I have seen are just astonishing, so beautiful, so creative. So when my friend Chris said she was reading
the book, I was spurred on to download it on my iPad. 900 pages is much too big to read in paper
form; so heavy, so unwieldy – I so love my iPad! As far as I know, Chris never reads fantasy
books…so Game of Thrones must be a
real winner!
And
yes it is very well written, very powerful, with strong characters,
intricate plot lines. My problem is…I
just dread returning to it each night. I
pick up my iPad with a faint shudder, and squeeze my eyes a bit shut to prepare
myself the fresh drama, intrigue, horror.
I have in fact sopped reading it for the moment; it is still there, on
my iPad, open at the page where I left it – the slaughter of Lady the direwolf
and of poor little Arya’s raggedy butcher-boy friend, Mycah, is still vivid in
my mind…
On
our way to work on Wednesday, I told Jeff about my cowardly abandonment of Game of Thrones – when the going gets
tough the tough keep reading, surely??
That night he brought me a snippet from the newspaper – something which
had appeared on Twitter:
Game of Thrones is
like Twitter. There are 140 characters
and something awful is always happening.
Indeed!
Not one for my book group then.
ReplyDeleteAnd it only gets worse.... I have now read all the Game of Thrones books that have so far been published. Another is apparently in the works. I have become fond of several characters and they have been summarily killed off in various cruel and awful ways. However, it is addictive. I went to bed at night and spent a long time thinking about what I'd read. I think its such a complex and intriguing story and such a densely imagined world, with various echoes of our own.But it is almost as if George Martin delights in creating sympathetic characters and then exterminating them, although perhaps that's the way of the world.
ReplyDelete