For the League’s fantasy aficionados (and Erik, who I know loves this stuff): Alyssa Rosenberg is blogging George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice. Here’s her latest entry.
Will
Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.
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I wish I could read her others but I can’t seem to sift them out of her general blog.
I wish Martin would get the books moving out. I’m starting to fear that we’re going to be dealing with another goddamn Robert Jordan here.Report
@North, I am not a Jordanphile but I hang with a handful and they point out that the most recent book was frickin’ awesome. One even went so far as to say that it’s the best book since, like, number 8 or something.
This is not a personal endorsement (haven’t read it or any of them) but in the process of bugging my “wheelie” buds, they pretty much universally sang the praises of the last book and how it started tying off storylines.
For what that’s worth.Report
@Jaybird, Jaybird, what I mean by “Another Jordan” is that you have an author with an awesome world and fascinating story who produces a book every two years or so and then eventually dies before finishing the series. The last book, for instance, was written by his replacement working off his notes. I loved Jordan’s books (though his characters interaction with women always made me a little annoyed) but the man produced books very very slowly.Report
@North, Another Jordan fan. I got sucked into those, way back when. I rather liked the poly aspects.Report
@Cascadian, Hi Cas,
Oh no, I didn’t even blink at the polygamous aspects. What bothered me was hard to put my finger on. I think it may have been the three main characters (Rand, Matt and Perrin) attitudes towards women that rubbed me the wrong way. I wouldn’t even think of suggesting that it was the author’s bias; he wrote strongly from the point of view of wonderful women characters. I think it may have just been his conscious choice of attitude for those characters that bothered me.
And yes I was sucked in a few years ago. I was one of the lucky ones; I was able to read up to like 2 books ago before I ran out. Some of my co-fans had been waiting book to book since book one. I couldn’t imagine!Report
I’m way past fearing that we’ve got another Robert Jordan; I’m quite confident that our best-case scenario is to get A Dance with Dragons and nothing else, with nothing else at all a more probably outcome. That’s why I’m paying more attention to how Patrick Rothfuss’s next book is coming, since I think there’s a chance that he won’t break my heart.Report
@Don Zeko, /wristReport
@North, Yeah, sorry for being such a downer dude, but I can’t help. I can feel it in my bones; he’s going to pull a Jordan on us.Report
@Don Zeko, Well let’s hope not.Report
One of the more interesting shifts that’s happened in my lifetime has been wider acceptance of porn on the left. There have always been more libertarian liberals who were okay with porn, of course- does anyone remember the 1990s free-speech, anti-PC magazine Gauntlet, for instance? But when I was about 19, most of the people I knew personally on the left were pretty strongly opposed to pornography, and there were a handful of “pro-porn feminists”- such as Susie Bright, who took a lot of flak. I remember being frequently called “the libertarian” among friends on the left for having no real problem with smut. People might remember the documentary “Not a Love Story” for instance- I went to a screening of that in which socially conservative Catholics and radical feminists came together in their belief that smut was akin to Nazi race propaganda and I was basically very isolated there.
Nowadays, however, I hear criticisms of porn so rarely on the left that the chapter in Empire of Illusion about the evils of pornography came as a bit of a surprise. People say that porn has “gone mainstream”, but I wonder if criticism of pornography hasn’t just become more taboo. Of course, we can discuss that when we get to the book!Report
@Rufus, Oh, wrong thread! Whoops!Report