Being a nosy sort of person, I like to check out what people are reading when they read in public. At lunchtime today at Chipotle a young woman was reading George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (1996). In terms of fantasy and science fiction, Martin is the clear leader in my unscientific observations of what people read. It used to be that Stephen King was the genre’s favorite read-in-public author, and maybe it will be King again with Under the Dome (2009).
Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire epic, of which A Game of Thrones is the first volume of four extant, is a remarkable multithreaded novel, inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and it’s far from finished. The several thousand pages so far published read quickly and are dark, surprising, intricately plotted, and full of sex and violence. The story is told from a wide variety of well-drawn viewpoint characters.
I don’t, as a rule, read or recommend an unfinished work. I’ll make an exception and recommend this one.
Links
George R.R. Martin: Not a Blog
Soon to be an HBO series? Update
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