Hello everyone. Uh... A long, ramble-y post about books. Worth a read I think, but bear with me and it might be useful? I don't know. You might find humor, a new read, or something useful out of this. Just a warning before hand.
So, after an extensive time reading, I just finished reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. A large, mammoth of a book sporting over 800 pages and words printed small enough to make me squint even with reading glasses on. To be frank though, it was really good. The main characters that the story was focused around had me very engaged and attached, the plot was dynamic and filled with some good twists and surprises, and the overall story was well composed and the continuity was spectacular for a novel of such length.
The whole time I read it, I had felt attached to almost every character, and it was almost impossible for me to point at a House and claim "They are the bad guys!" because it felt like they all had perfectly good reasons for their actions, at least most of the time.
Except this smug jerk. This guy, and most of the House Lannister can go find a nice deep dark hole to die in.
Moving on...
I overall extremely liked the book, and I can't wait to read the next one. I have to watch the series too, at least the first season, seeing how much of it won't exactly be spoiled as I already finished the first book. With all the characters in the book (I'm telling you, there were at least fifty) it was really hard to try to imagine what most of them would look like. The show should really help put a face to the names. One problem arises before I move on to the next novel though...
I have a book problem. Some people are addicted to drugs, others to hugs, others to mugs and glugs, some weirdos like slugs. But me? I can't stop reading. I have visited the library several times in the past few weeks and every time I've gone, I have picked up two or three books that interest me. How can I even start new books when they keep piling up?! Oh well, I'll get to everything eventually!
So far I got some easy books as well as a couple of harder books lined up. Two children novels; one from one of my favorite author(s) Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart. It's a short thing, illustrated and fun. Nothing too serious.
Then I've got another kid's novel; it's a small science-fiction novel that I read many many moons ago. It's called When the Tripods Came. The concept was really interesting to me when I read it (basically these Tripod rulers come, brainwash the world, and enslaves the whole human race) who knows how many years ago, and I want to read it just to refresh what the book is about. You know, to figure out what the whole idea actually means, and since my brain has matured far more than it did when I was younger, it should be more interesting.
Then I got another Ray Bradbury book, The Illustrated Man. One of my posts recently discussed how I felt about him as an author, and I have been meaning to read more of his works. I eventually want to get to re-reading The Martian Chronicles, which I read as a freshman. I want to tackle it again now that I have a better understanding of how Bradbury succeeds as a writer.
Finally, I got a collection of short horror stories, just in time for Halloween. The collection is a bunch of writing that H.P. Lovecraft did in his years. If you aren't familiar with this author, he wrote a ton of horror/scary/terrifying things; but scary in a sort of psychosis, mind-numbing, "you're going insane because the ancient distorted beings from the furthest ring willed it" way. One example is his fictional universe in which he created The Elder Gods (such as Cthulhu) which gained notoriety for it's uniqueness, and blossomed to a large following, especially on the internet. The non-voters of 2012 even ran this Cthulhu guy as a satirical presidential candidate. The thing that sort of got me interested is a novel I read around two years ago? I was a sophomore I believe. It's called House of Leaves and it is written by Mark Z. Danielewski, which I think was inspired by Lovecraftian horror (this Lovecraft guy was so popular he even inspired an entire genre). There's even a pretty interesting podcast which is inspired by Lovecraft horror.
Past that, I am reading the Book Thief for the Book Club at our school (which I guess is not about a magical world in which a mysterious wizard is stealing books and causing some sort of destruction by doing so... Oops.), and past that, I think I am going to try to read the next A Song of Ice and Fire book (aka Game of Thrones). Further down the line, I plan another re-read of The Martian Chronicles, as I said earlier; a re-read of the Edge Chronicles series, which I have a deep love for due to it's hardcore fantasy/steampunk setting; and possibly another re-read of A House of Leaves, which is one of my favorite "weird" novels. Antique. Whatever you wanna call it. And this is just the planned stuff, who knows what kind of treasures I will find down the road at my subsequent visits to the library. I'm not even going to start counting all the awesome stuff I manage to find at Grassroots and various thrift shops. I walked out last week with ten new books... You should really take a look at my now-overflowing bookshelf.
Well, for those of you who stuck through my rambling about books, good job. I think I threw out a ton of good suggestions for anyone who is looking to read a new book, which is something I have been asked to do by several of my friends. Guess I can direct them here now! But if you have any other suggestions as well, let me know. I'm pretty open to just about everything.
Thanks for sticking through with my ramblings.
Good night viewers. Good night.
(Word Count: 1068 words)
No comments:
Post a Comment