I Hate George R.R. Martin and Hope He Dies Before He Finishes His Next Book

I just finished A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin's fifth book in his epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, and while it's not as tedious and annoying as A Feast for Crows, it is still pretty damn boring . . . overly-descriptive and hyper-detailed in a self-congratulatory style that begs for editing -- reading it was more like homework than pleasure, and there is no comparison to the first three books -- which were fast-paced, grim, realistic, surprising, and genre-breaking . . . I finished this one simply to find out what happens, and when I was mired seven hundred pages in, dealing with chapter after chapter of incomprehensible family relationships, bloody flux, and descriptions of provisions, I realized that perhaps I had read more pages of George R.R. Martin than any other author -- over 5000 pages of his prose (I've read a lot of Neal Stephenson and Elmore Leonard and Kurt Vonnegut, but probably not 5000 pages worth . . . maybe Stephen J. Gould?) and I haven't really liked the last 2000 pages of his narrative, but I'm in too deep to quit now, and so I'm hoping that Martin contracts a fatal case of the "pale mare" before he publishes another pedantic volume, and thus spares me from reading it (although I'm sure even if he dies, some hack will take his notes and finish the saga . . . and I'll probably read it just so I'm ahead of the HBO series and don't end up being humiliated in a "Red Wedding Reactions Compilation" video).

How To Not Read George R.R. Martin

So I am still on extended leave from the new George R.R. Martin book, A Dance With Dragons-- I am three hundred pages in but I keep picking up other entertaining titles that keep me from Westeros . . . the latest is a four hundred page thriller by Gillian Flynn (who is far cuter than George R.R. Martin . . . I know this because when my eyes get tired, I invariably open to the back flap of library boks and look at the author . . . and I'm aways amazed when someone cute has written a book, because you'd think they'd have better things to do) and I read this rather thick novel, called Gone Girl, in two days-- partly because of a quad pull, but mainly because it's a true literary page-turner; the book is detailed and realistically written; the narrators have sharp, witty, and unreliable voices; the chapters are short and always significant; the prose is perfectly written; and the plot is preposterous . . . you know the twists are coming, but they are difficult to predict in their entirety, and in the end, despite its realism, the book is good macabre fun: ten Punch and Judy dolls out of ten.

George R.R. Martin: Fantasy Without Whimsy

For the second time in as many months, I took on a novel with two things I despise-- a map and an appendix-- but George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones was so highly recommended by everyone who read it that I had to give it a shot, and unlike Dune, which I couldn't quite finish, I read all 676 pages of Martin's first volume of his epic Song of Fire and Ice series (and even referred to the map and the appendix several times!) and though I felt a bit childish at the start . . . I'm forty-one years old and usually reading books like this, not sword and sorcery stories . . . I very well may read the next volume (A Clash of Kings) and I will definitely check out the big-budget HBO series inspired by the first book; I will admit that I started the book trying to find reasons to hate it, but the form drew me in: short, exciting and strategic chapters, each told from a different character's point of view,  following Elmore Leonard's philosophy of "leaving out all the parts that people skip," with the pacing of a J.K. Rowling book, but sophisticated and very adult content (thus the need for the appendix) and far more entertaining and action-packed than the slow paced but similar Tolkien books and with one other extremely important improvement: no elves (I hate elves and anything else that smacks of whimsy, and a A Game of Thrones is definitely the least whimsical of fantasy novels).

You Shouldn't Wish People Dead (Spoilers?)

I'd like to apologize for my sentence the other day about George R.R. Martin -- it's gauche to wish someone dead just because he wrote a boring book, and it's my fault for finishing the thing, but I will say this -- and I don't even think these are spoilers -- there are two big scenes in A Dance with Dragons that take a nearly a thousand pages of exposition to set up, and each one contains a vital character that there is no possible way in hell anyone except the nerdiest of the nerdiest is going to remember . . . the first is when Bloodbeard presents the head of Groleo to King Hizdahr . . . and you are supposed to remember that this is some sort of retaliation for Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, but mainly I was thinking: Groleo? Who the f-- is Groleo? Am I supposed to know this Groleo? I am supposed to feel a certain way about his severed head? and then in the last chapter (but before the Epilogue) Daenerys, starved and stranded in the Dothraki grasslands, but accompanied by her dragon, encounters the khalasar of Khal Jhaqo, who betrayed her old husband -- Khal Drogo -- after his death . . . but again, I was thinking: who the f-- is Khal Jhaqo? Is this an interesting coincidence? A new character? because I think the last time he was in the series was several thousand pages ago . . . but thank the Seven Gods for the internet -- but if I'm going to have to read the internet every time something happens in the series, then there is something seriously wrong with this series, and upon further reflection, I'm taking back my apology and once again wishing George R.R. Martin dead, so that I don't have to suffer through any more climactic anti-climaxes.

A Very Nerdy Connection

Here's one for all the dorks out there: I was reading Jared Diamond's new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? . . . and not only that, but I was reading it on my new Kindle -- and so I made an electronic bookmark when I ran across this passage: "a traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast: documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused attention on eating and drinking" because it reminded me of the infamous Red Wedding in George R.R. Martin's third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series . . . and my internet research revealed that Martin's Red Wedding (not to be confused with Billy Idol's White Wedding) was inspired by an actual historical event -- the Black Dinner  , a treacherous feast in Scotland in the year 1440 . . . indeed!

A Fantastic Ratio

I finally polished off George R.R. Martin's second novel in his epic The Song of Fire and Ice . . . A Clash of Kings is long, bleak, and complex-- it's definitely got the "Empire Strikes Back" groove-- and I have figured out the secret of how Martin retains his magical lack of whimsy: his proper name to adjective ratio is ten to one.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Game of Thrones

I read George R.R. Martin's fantasy masterpiece Game of Thrones last year, and I was nervous about how it would translate to the small screen, but everyone is perfectly cast-- from Tyrion the dwarf to Daenerys to Ned Stark-- the characters met all my expectations and usually exceeded them (aside from Khal Drogo's impeccably waxed back) but here is the sad thing: after watching a few episodes, I no longer remember how I originally imagined the characters-- once I saw them rendered on my giant HDTV, all the previous images that I created, the unique vision of the novel that I held in my mind's eye-- this was instantly erased from my anemic brain; and we are used to this . . . it happens all the time: Billy Beane is Brad Pitt, John Adams is Paul Giamatti, and-- horror of horrors-- Hester Prynne is Demi Moore . . .we are no match for HD technology, and I suppose it's fine, in most cases, but there is some kid out there, who when you say "Johnny Cash," he imagines Joaquin Phoenix, and that is a travesty.

In The Dark

When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom contains two weird novellas; in both stories, small-town life becomes even smaller-- the stories are macabre, full of plot holes, possibly allegorical, and oddly compelling-- and they will really stretch your empathy muscles and let you see from two very unique and very strange female perspectives-- a tunnel dwelling troglodyte of a mom and a lonely, dimwitted, traumatized old woman without a nose . . . and according to George R.R. Martin, this is the point of fiction: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . the man who never reads lives only one.” 

How To Use The Self-Checkout Kiosk At the Library

They have a new self-checkout kiosk at the library, so you can borrow a book without having to undergo the scrutiny of the librarian . . . now you can take out all those racy romance novels and sex manuals and hemorrhoid treatment tomes that you were previously too embarrassed to hand to the old lady at the desk, for fear that she'd make some small talk about them; I didn't go for anything particularly racy, instead I checked out Anne Coulter's newest book Demonic . . . I was curious as to what she has to say, but never wanted to be seen holding one of her books . . . I only read a few chapters, but I think I got the idea of the theme-- she creates a portrait of a typical liberal and then attacks that portrait, and in this book she paints a liberal as someone belonging to a mindless and dangerous "mob," which strikes me as funny, because-- according to Paul Krugman-- I am certainly a liberal, and maybe even a lazy progressive, but, as anyone who knows me knows, I hate mobs (unless I'm 19 years old and moshing to Primus) and absolutely refuse to take part in them . . . I get claustrophobic and anxious in large groups, hate chanting and marching, and I won't even do "the wave" at a sporting event, and so it's like an outer body experience reading this book-- as I know Coulter is attacking me, I'm right in her wheelhouse . . . I drive "the third most liberal car in America" and I think gay people should be able to get married, I think women should have free reign over their vaginas-- including the right to vajazzle-- I think drugs should be legalized, I think assault weapons should be illegalized, I think we should fund the arts, and I think the environment is more important than the economy, and-- though I am loath to admit it-- I think that I should probably be taxed a bit more and people that make a boatload of money should be taxed substantially more, so that we can make the infrastructure of this country as great as possible . . . and that probably completes someone's stereotype of a typical "liberal," and I'm sure I've got my own composite of a stereotypical conservative-- though none of the conservatives I know fit into that composite . . . Coulter occasionally attacks these run of the mill beliefs with inside jokes and sarcasm, but mainly it's this other thing: conservatives aren't the crazy racist zealous mob, liberals are! liberals are afraid of science! (unless it's evolution, I guess) liberals are the KKK! etc. and though I wish I had the patience to make it all the way through, because it's important to see both sides of the political spectrum, even the radical political spectrum, I found it much more politically enlightening to finish George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords . . . he is the conservative of the fantasy genre, concerned with realpolitik, finance, defense, and tactics, instead of happy elves.

Karen Thompson Walker Uses The Word "Miracle" In a Different Manner Than I Use The Word "Miracle"

Karen Thompson Walker's new novel The Age of Miracles portrays an unusually delicate and precise apocalypse, and her narrator is equally delicate and precise in her explanation of this odd and slow way for all things familiar to end; to explain: the earth's rotation begins to decay, and the days and nights gradually grow longer-- wreaking havoc with both the middle school bell schedule and the earth's magnetic field . . . hierarchies change at the bus stop and people revise their circadian rhythms . . . or some people do (they keep clock time) while a minority refuse and try to adjust to the much longer days and nights-- and I read this book to take a break from George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," a series which spans thousands and thousands of pages and claims that "winter is coming"-- but if you want winter to actually come-- and summer too-- all in the same day, then read this book: ten beached whales out of ten.

I Choose Style Over Substance

After reading six hundred pages of the second George R.R. Martin novel, A Clash of Kings, I have given up-- and while I admit that the plot is awesome and epic, I need a few adjectives when I am reading a novel . . . a little bit of style, and so instead I am wading through China Mieville's densely described genre-bending Perdido Street Station, a tale of bestial love in the city that is a veritable bestiary, New Crobuzon, and though the book has a map at the start, you don't need it . . . you can just groove on the freaky descriptions.

Glad That's Over With

I finished the fourth George R.R. Martin book in his epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, and all I can say about A Feast For Crows is that I survived it (unlike most of the characters) and I hope the next one is an easier read.

Why Did I Read This?

I thought I should read something more literary before returning to the juvenile pleasures of George R.R. Martin, and so I tackled and finished Stewart O'Nan's Wish You Were Here, a 514 page account of the Maxwell family's last visit to their lake house in Chautauga, New York . . . the patriarch of the family has died and his wife Emily doesn't have the time, money, or patience to take care of their family vacation cottage, and her children aren't financially capable of taking over the deed . . . and so, in the span of a week, the novel shows all nine Maxwells-- who are definitely "lost souls" since Henry died, "swimming in the fish bowl" of the little cottage, as they literally run "over the same old ground" and find "the same old fears," and though a certain synopsis might sound exciting and full of conflict: let's stuff a failed artist, a recently divorced, often stoned recovering alcoholic mom, her hot and boy-crazy teenage daughter, a frustrated photographer, his shy teenage daughter who has an incestuous lesbian crush on her cousin, a kleptomaniac kid, a wacky retired teacher, and a cranky widow in a small space, and throw a ominous kidnapping into the background . . . but the reality that O'Nan is trying to capture is different . . . everyone is on good behavior and overwhelmed by nostalgia and essentially lost in their own heads and Lise sums up the theme: "She wondered what her life would look like in a book . . . now that was a depressing idea . . . she thought that her life was average and nothing to be ashamed of . . . the world wasn't as magical as people liked to believe . . . that was why they read books to escape it," but-- of course-- a book like this isn't an escape from reality, it's a portrait of it, and I am glad I am through with it and can return to a book where "wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside" because it is getting near summer, after all, and soon enough I'll be living O'Nan's reality, so I'm not sure why I forced myself to read about it.

For George R.R. Martin Fans Only

Tysha is Tyrion's Rosebud.

It's Not All Books That Are As Dull as Their Readers (But Some Are!)

I started my summer reading with two rather boring tomes, or I find them boring -- which may be a shortcoming of my own brain, but at least I recognize that they are boring for contrary reasons: Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong is by Edward Conard, a former managing director of Bain Capital -- and while it paints a rather different picture of the 2008 Financial Collapse than the documentary Inside Job or The Big Short by Michael Lewis (according to Conard, the collapse was a run on the bank, caused by a lack of faith in short term credit, not the fault of CDO's and credit default swaps -- and the government was largely to blame for this by subsidizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which allowed the creation of more and more sub-prime loans . . . his philosophy is: why would banks want to hold mortgages they thought would default, unless forced by the government to issue such loans, and he also blames "irrational exuberance" in the real-estate market . . . some people -- such as this Anonymous Banker --think Conard makes some good points, while other folks hate his guts and think the book is a "serious abuse of facts") and while I think he makes some logical points about how America is competing against 75 cents-an-hour labor overseas and needs to counter this with investment and innovation -- I mainly want to say this is one of the driest, most boring books I have ever read, and any attempt Conard makes to insert humor into the flow is forced and pathetic, and he offers no anecdotes from his time at Bain Capital, nor does he ever address the human cost of the crisis -- he's very cold and cavalier about the lost jobs, lost equity, the evictions, the short sales, and the general decay of the middle class -- so I can hardly recommend reading this thing unless you're really dying to learn more about the economic theory behind the Financial Crisis . . . on the other hand, I am six hundred pages through George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons and this book is SO full of anecdote and detail and description that the plot barely moves . . . and I can't recommend this book unless you're dying to find out more things about the pantheon of Game of Thrones characters -- as it is NOT a thrilling read.

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin