Buried In A Book

El Capitan's Latest Obsession

This is all Leslie's fault...

Every spare minute for the past two weeks I've had my nose stuck in one of the first three novels in George R.R. Martin's 'A Song Of Ice & Fire'.

HBO's currently running a miniseries based on the first novel, 'A Game Of Thrones'. Leslie had blogged about the series a few times, but her recent post tweaked my interest, so I started hunting the local Half Price Books looking for a copy.

Others must have had the same idea as me, and I was unable to get a used copy. So, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and got a new copy.

I got lucky at the Half Price in San Marcos with volumes 2 & 3. It's a college town, so the Sci-Fi/Fantasy selection is typically a lot better than in Houston.

Each one of these big mofos runs 750-900 pages, and they're one hell of a wild ride. The theme of the series is "When playing the game of thrones, you win or you die".

And they die in droves. Martin's not at all shy of killing off main characters. The ones you think are gonna live? Nope. They die. The body count is something you'd find in a typical Crusade or Mongol invasion...

I'm just about finished with #3, and #4 is due to show up via eBay in the next few days.

As for #5, well, who knows. It turns out that GRRM hasn't been keeping up the pace of writing. There's even a website called "Finish the book, George" dedicated to haranguing him to complete the series. It's supposed to be released in July, but I've played this game with Robert Jordan's 'Wheel Of Time' series, so I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, if the HBO series is half as good as the novels, you might want to give it a watch. I'm HBO-less, so I'll be buying the DVDs when they're released, hopefully this fall.

Thanks, Leslie!!