Drinking the Kool Aid

I try to keep up with popular culture because it's a requirement for my job, and I love me some SFF anyway, but I've been avoiding Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" because I hate catching up to an author then having to wait around until he or she finished it. Worse still, perhaps, it has been mentioned that Martin, who is notoriously slow, aging, and visibly out of shape, runs the risk of "pulling a Jordan" as Kamil mischeviously put it on the Sword & Laser boards...which would mean I'd have to wait until Brandon Sanderson, or someone else, finished off the series for him.

But after the brouhaha about the 'Red Wedding,' I had to knuckle under and give them a try. It was going to be too hard to continue to call myself conversant in the genre without doing so, and in any case I'm always fascinated when a book becomes a cultural touchstone, and HOLY CRAP THESE BOOKS ARE GOOD.

Really. There's a tendency to be a bit distrustful of hype, naturally, when the world is so full of disappointments. I don't subscribe to Matthew Arnold's late Victorian premise that popular = bad out of sheer snobbiness, but we've got too many Justin Biebers and Twilights in the cultural matrix to be comfortable with fame as a measure of quality. Could something so popular really be *that* good.

Better. So much better. Partially, I'm going to be snobby and say, because I think people completely misread both the diagesis and didactic purpose of the series, but that's grist for a later entry. Suffice to say for now that I've become a complete junkie. I'm on book three, and considering the speed with which I've been downing these 1,000 page monsters, that's saying something.

Lordy, help me. I'm going to run out soon. Then what? I'm going to join the legions of Martin's zombies begging him to write faster.
I'm doomed.