• GAME OF THRONES

• by George R. R. Martin
• [rated by PBS readers as #48]
• 704 pages

I have formulated a list within a list of the PBS reads for this. If you knew me, that list within a list thing wouldn’t surprise you a bit.

Anyway, it is a list of the real “bears” I have coming up on the remaining list – long slogs, hopefully fun but who the hell knows, if boring as all hell what will I do, etc. I will not list those now, because I’m hoping to mention them in hindsight after reading them, thrilled to have been proven wrong.

So I’m rambling. The upshot is that I need to read one of those long-winded bears every three books. I have no idea why I’m so sure of this but I know in my soul that if I’m left in the end with only bears, this project won’t happen. Well, it’ll happen, it’s happening as we speak, but it won’t finish. Is what it won’t do.

Fresh from two little teeny books, it was time for a bear. I picked four titles and Game of Thrones was the bear. I dove in.

The first thing I realized is that when you are over 50 years old, you lose your ability to remember a novel with 50 characters introduced in the first 50 pages. GONE!

Plus, these characters had names I couldn’t pronounce, which pretty much seals the deal for vaporizing characters in the mind of yours truly.

But the other post 50 thing you realize is that you just go on autopilot and say, I’ll ramble along and if the writing is good, they will become clearer to me.

There isn’t a doubt in the world that the writing is good. Martin has created an entire, cogent Universe, a place where geeks can mentally slide into and geek out beyond their wildest dreams.

Problem being that, while equal to any geek in weirdness, Thrones isn’t my particular geek fantasy direction, so the going got a bit hard. I eventually knew who was who but I kept forgetting who were in the same family. I mean, shit. I even forgot stuff like that when I was a therapist and I was paid to remember it!

But here, it isn’t just family members. It was who was married to who until he got killed by who and now owes his life or allegiance to who. Geez!

One irony here is that I had never been drawn to the TV show, but now I sort of am! The reason is that I am not entirely visual and so I’m imagining a small portion of this and it would be fun to see visually where it was taken.

And maybe if I watched it, I would finally know how to pronounce some of these names, for pity sakes!

I am about two thirds through it. For my blog book, I’ve been stuck on it for quite a long time.

But I realized the other day that there is a simple reason – simple but hard to overcome. It just isn’t a place that I long to return to. It is an amazing place, but it isn’t my thing.

But hey. 200 and some pages left. I’ll get there!

DONE! DAT DA DA DA DA DA DAT!!!

Being the Sherlocks that you are, I know you figured out that I’m done with it.

I have never, throughout a third of the project so far,  felt the sense of relief that I did finishing this one off.

That IS a little puzzling, now that I’m done, of course. I didn’t hate anything about it. To be brutally honest, I didn’t care anything about it either. The characters and their Universe are spectacularly captured in this tome.

As I believe I wrote earlier, this is the first and only thing I have read in this blog, or beyond that, that I want to see the TV equivalent for. The primary reason for this is to see how a crack design team takes my limited visual imagination and fills it all the way out.

Since I have no allegiance to anyone in this story (well, I did like one guy whose head is now on a spear on top of some bad guy’s castle somewhere), I couldn’t possibly experience some primal quibble over the casting.

But I must also add that one season will probably be enough. I’m basing that on all the open storylines after this first book and how I am not really anxious to know what happens to any of them.

One last time, I must say this. I COMPLETELY GET how this book went into millions of people’s hearts and lives.

It was what they were looking for and the author gave them a story and more than that. He gave them a whole world. Bless him for doing that. Truly.

We live in a world with people desperate for comradeship. Thank God whenever it presents itself.

The fact that I am not so into prehistoric battles and people wearing chains that don’t bathe very often doesn’t change the appeal. Because the appeal for this little reader wasn’t there. But I read it, and I’m proud of myself.

My hat is off to Martin, a writer of extraordinary creativity.

For my next book, I’ve labeled the really long books, approximately a quarter of the books I’ve got left. And though I didn’t want to go directly to one of those, I also didn’t want anything too easy.

So I picked something I’d already seen at the movies, but hadn’t read. I hope it will be surprising but, given my track record in this blog, how could it not?