Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I slammed my fourth toe into a radiator this afternoon, and now it's black and swollen to double its normal size. I started to read about broken toe symptoms/ treatment but it made me queasy and I stopped. (I have no idea whether or not its broken, just that it hurts. A lot.)

Guess I'll just have to lie around and whine and look pitiful. (Its only been five years since THAT was effective....)

No posts in a while since Dan was supposed to write about his visit to kindergarten and our weekend at the Four Corners Holiday Open House (a.k.a. "when the woman working at Island Inkjet congratulated me on my pregnancy"- I didn't think I looked THAT bad). But apparently he's not.

C must not be a pariah at kindergarten, because we ran into two of his classmates over the weekend and they both talked to him. One invited him to sit at her table to eat his cookies, and the other (whom C spied through the window of the Chinese restaurant; her parents must own the place) gave him a fortune cookie. (He now keeps the fortune hidden under his napkin at the table, and has told us NOT to look under there or replace his dirty napkin because he thinks it's a secret.)

A walks all the time now; it's sad to realize that we'll never have a crawly little baby again. She's trying to talk, and does use specific sounds for specific things, but all her sounds are so similar we can only decipher them according to context. (Examples: she makes a "ca" sound for car, "caw" for the sound a crow makes, "qua" for squirrel, and "cuh" for Paco. And she refuses to enunciate.) She's taken to saying "dah-dah" for random things that she wants or likes; while I told him to take it as a compliment, Dan isn't too happy with his name being generalized so.

A few months after C was born, I started to read G.R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. I saw the first book at the library, and its summary said it was the first in a trilogy. Already having spent years eagerly awaiting the conclusion of Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy, I didn't want to go through that again, and checked to see if there would be a long wait before the other books were released. Luckily (I believed), Book Three had just been published! (And it had dragons in the title; maybe he would have tips for dealing with our dragon-baby.) So I read them all, and if you're at all familiar with these books you will know that they're each around 1500 pages long and have about 100 characters whose histories are important to know (this is not an exaggeration). Getting into these books is a commitment (a worthwhile one, I feel, but definitely a commitment). About halfway through the third book, I wondered how on earth he was going to finish this up in "only" 800 more pages- and realized that, indeed, the flap summary of "A Game of Thrones" had lied to me. Now he's planning SEVEN books. And he ends them all with multiple cliffhangers.

Only now, FIVE years later, has Book Four been published, after being pushed back several times. I got it from the library and read it this past week, and it was a huge struggle to try to re-remember who ALL these people are and why they're important. (The 40-page lineage appendix wasn't all that helpful either.) Much of the "history" I've forgotten completely, and I can't remember the names of most of the people involved in the events I DO remember. I don't have a prayer of being able to even FOLLOW the next book, probably.

But can I wait another 10 years, hope GRR doesn't die before finishing this series, and then re-read them all and actually understand them? Noooo. He left my favorite character blind and multiple other important characters on the verge of death. (And the next book likely will not include the outcomes of these characters, since it will focus on events happening in a different part of the world; I'll have to wait for #6.) GRR.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I gave up at the end of the third book, I think (maybe second). I can barely remember any of it now, but he either killed off or permanently maimed or exiled or otherwise something awful-ed the only character I liked in the whole dramatis personae.

(They were recommended to me and had "Crow" in the title.)

I had much the same problem with the Chung Kuo books (http://members.cox.net/kdrum/Chungkuo.htm). They didn't sit still enough for me to like any characters. Feh.
-shannon

Dan said...

At least the Wingrove series is DONE! As your reviewer said, "the story is so unbelievably complex that if you put it down for a couple of months you'd probably be hopelessly confused when you picked it back up." So the four years I just waited was waaaay too long....

I kind of like that Martin is willing to kill off important and sympathetic characters; it makes it more realistic and unpredictable. (I was blown away when the man I considered the main protagonist was executed in the first or second book.) But it does make for a less satisfying read- given what's happened in the last four books, he may well have the dragons annihilate all the humans on earth in the last book.