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Shaking the hand of this writer's hero
This may be my first true confession. This isn’t a story I share with everyone. Okay, strike that, I share this story with everyone that will listen. I love the Fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. I want to have it’s babies. There are only four books available of the seven planned in the series and I have read each of them at least three times. And I am not one who is likely to read many books more than once. I even have the audio book for each title in the series and have listened to each at least once. This is true obsession.
Why do I love this series so much? There are a number of factors. I believe the first reason involves the way Mr. Martin tells a story. He used to work in TV, writing for shows like Beauty and the Beast and the Twilight Zone. He manages to make every chapter it’s own stand alone piece of literature. And all the chapters manage to weave together impeccably to create the feeling of a whole story, complete with true beginning, middle, climax and resolution. He manages to create a believable cliffhanger, major or minor, at the end of every chapter that keeps you reading. His language is interesting, clear and concise, with a touch of dramatic flair required of most fantasy novels. His characters are always interesting and every one of them has an intriguing character arc, each changing in their own way for better or worse. They’re all believable within the logic of his fantasy world.
The second reason is just as important. I took a year off between high school and college and while I thought this was a good idea at the time, it changed a great deal about my social scene and was not as satisfying as I had imagined. So while I started the first book, A Game of Thrones, when I was a senior in high school, the second and third in the series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords respectively, kept me company while whittling away my time between academic endeavors. I invested a great deal more time and energy into the books because of this. I’m a big believer in the fact that a book can have a great deal more power depending on when in life you read. Certain environments allow you to relate to stories with greater ease than others.
The host of other reasons delve deeply into different aspects of his writing and the story itself. His series was the first fantasy series I had ever read that created a believable shade of gray in the morality and development of every single character. Many characters thought to be evil were simply characters that made selfish and poor decisions. Good characters that had to make terrible decisions that they thought were right, but objectively were just as evil as the shadier characters. His characters lived and breathed for me and became so much more than the heroic and villainous archetypes that had brought on some form of my disillusionment toward the fantasy genre.
I love books, I love to share great stories with other people and there has been no other book or series that has garnered near as much of my attention. And I am proud and hesitant to admit I have purchased just over 30 copies of A Game of Thrones for friends and family. In most cases one might think this a great boon to the author and an admirable quality in a book nerd. To love something enough to share with a few friends, but to actively seek book nerds that will read the book so that I can buy it for them? That’s what we like to call obsession.
Do you have a book or author that you actively champion? Why do you relate so deeply with that book/author?
