It has now been a month, George. One month spent reading your series “A Song of Ice and Fire.” And considering I am only on book four and your books are approximately the size of Wyoming, I still have miles to go before I sleep.*
See, thanks to you, George, every free second of my life is now devoted to your stupid books. I can’t put them down (and when I do I have to make sure I don’t set them down on any small children and/or pets so they don’t get crushed to death).
And the further I get into the books, the worse it gets. For example, I now read in the shower…
I’m now reading when I should be working, which can make for some lived and died without setting eyes upon salt water confusing articles.
If I actually did yoga instead of lying on my mat eating Cheetos, I’d read even while doing yoga:
And don’t ask me how I managed it, but I’ve even read during sex before:
Hell, I’m pretty sure at some point during “A Storm of Swords,” my husband had surgery or something and almost died or some junk but to be honest, I have no idea. I was too engrossed in whether or not Jon Snow would take over Winterfell and if someone would finally get revenge on Joffrey.
Look, buddy, I’ll level with you. You’re not my first. I mean…heh…I mean, by FAR (I’ve, uh, been around the literary stacks, if you know what I mean). As a kid, I spent three weeks invested in Narnia followed by a guilty romp through the “Anne of Green Gables” series. At the turn of the century, pretty much most of my life was devoted to “Lord of the Rings”; the movies, the books, the Google searches of a shirtless Orlando Bloom. After that, I became obsessed with Harry Potter, disappearing for a week only to emerge from my cave, blinking from the glare of the unfamiliar sun, to find I missed my own funeral. I got down and dirty with Katniss and Lisbeth and, while I’m not proud of this next phase of my life, there was also that one afternoon when I read the entire Twilight series. In fact, I absorbed “New Moon” simply by taking an hour-long nap on it (doesn’t take a whole lot of brain power to absorb a teenage girl being mopey for 200 pages).
But the difference is that your books, Mr. Martin, are each 1,000 pages long and have approximately 62 million characters. In fact, the one I’m reading now, “A Feast for Crows,” has four maps and an 80 page appendix detailing who all the characters are. 80 pages, George! That is utterly ridiculous. But even though I know it is ridiculous, you have made these goddamned books so interesting that I actually do go back and forth between the stupid maps and the appendix so I make sure I’m keeping everything straight.
And then…and then…what? What the hell am I supposed to do when I finally finish the recently published fifth book? Wait for five years for you to finish the sixth? Huh?
HUH!?!
Look, dude, I’m from Generation X. Smartphones with 3G speed are too slow for us. I can’t wait around five years while you tinker around on your goddamned typewriter. Especially since I know you’re going to leave a shitload of cliffhangers and unanswered questions at the end of “A Dance of Dragons.”
I mean, a lot can happen in five years. Hell, in five years, books probably won’t even EXIST! Or worse yet, I could be a soccer mom! Who only cares about her stupid kids! And not a book series she read five years ago!
WHY ARE YOU RUINING MY LIFE, GEORGE!?!
P.S. If you kill off Arya Stark, I will hunt you down and stab you in the throat.
P.S.S. Don’t know if I mentioned this or not, but I’m a huge fan. You doing any book signings in Boston soon?
*I totes stole that line.
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