I took a long break from reading fantasy fiction, but currently have a craving for the flavor.
I’ve just started reading George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. The prologue uses probably the most exhausted cliché in fantasy and action/adventure fiction. Cocky lordling leads veteran soliders to their death.
Still I’m really looking forward to getting into this book and the rest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series.1 It has been recommended to me numerous times.2
I hesitated previously because I don’t like to start series that have not had their endings written. I made that mistake during high school in reading the first 8 tomes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series — and I mean tomes, each book comes in around a thousand pages of tiny print. Twelve books and twenty years later, the author is dead and the story is still unfinished. I can’t see myself revisiting that one.
A Song of Ice and Fire has 4 books written and 3 more planned.
What has forced my hand a little is that a HBO adaption is imminent.3 But mostly no other highly recommended books comes to mind.
- Could Martin’s choose cheezy titles for his book and series? [↩]
- It’s the most popular fantasy series according to the “Internet Book List“, a fact I learned from Wikipedia. [↩]
- HBO doing fantasy fiction is very exciting in itself! [↩]
Lloyd, I’m not a reader of fantasy. It’s one of my wife’s favorites genres but is something I haven’t ever really been interested in. Partially to sort of force a brief overlap in reading interests and partially because I had heard from various people independently that Martin wrote good stuff, I picked up this series. I put the fourth book down about halfway through a year or so ago, but not because I was tired of the series. I simply figured that with the fifth still unfinished, I’d have time to catch up later. It’s an interesting and even at times artful set of books. I eagerly await the HBO series; will have to upgrade my cable expressly for it.