The one sentence book review – what a cool idea.

A Storm of Sword – Stopped reading in the middle when I realized that the entire series was all about people w/ no control over their lives, who were miserable, trying to seize power in order to have some control over their own lives and thereby making everyone else miserable in the process.

A Desolation of the Soul.

I’m about half way through book three of the Game of Thrones series.  Storm of Swords is the title, I think.  Or is that book four, which I have not gotten to yet?  It really doesn’t matter.  Half way through and I decided I needed a break.

I have a theory about what is going on in the books.  Everything is a direct result of the soul-deep unhappiness that each and every person is experiencing in the book.

No one has any control over anything in their lives.  Every single character is forced to marry someone not of their choosing.  So far there has been one exception to that rule and the foreshadowing is that the results of that are going to be very bad. 

No one is allowed to do or be who they want.  Everyone is born into a role and that is their place no matter what.  There isn’t even the option of declaring ones self for the church as there would have been in Medieval Europe.  The closest thing is volunteering for the Night Watch. 

The entire series is a collection of horrible events after horrible events.   Every time a book ends with any hopeful situation, it reverses itself at the beginning of the next book. 

Ultimately, the quest for power seems to be a quest to be able to take control of ones life.  But the only route to that is to also have control over everyone else’s lives.  Even then, with an absolute monarchy, even the ruler didn’t have total control over their life.  They may have absolute control over everyone else and can live mostly as they please, even the ultimate authority is forced to marry someone they might not want.

All the events in the books can be traced back to a few selfish choices that set up everything else.  A mad king who wants a pretty girl and rapes her, a set of too close twins who develop an incestuous relationship in childhood and live for each other as adults, and a petulant, unstable man who sells his sister in order to try to retake his ‘birthright’.  Even that last one goes back to the first one and might be an extension of that.

The reason I’m having to take a break, in the middle of a book, is because it is so very, incredibly, depressing.  It feels like no one is ever going to have anything go well for them and everyone is going to die.  So I need something a little more upbeat to read before I go back and finish that.

The Site Stats Page Makes Me Crave More Information

Today is a strange day at work. It is an even stranger day on Word Press. I’ve had very few views. But they come from Russian Federation and Australia with one view from the UK and the USA.

The search terms are even stranger.

Game of Thrones Forehead. Since I don’t have cable, I don’t know why there is a forehead reference in conjunction with Game of Thrones. I do understand how I might have popped up in a search and I think I have three blogs that have dealt with the title and the book and why I wasn’t watching the show.

Mary Kate Daddy Issues. Yep, I wrote a blog on this last week. I am just surprised my humble little blog would pop up in a search.

Something Old Something New Something Borrowed Something Blue. Hmmm, this one is harder to figure out. I’ve not used the saying before. I’ve not had many blogs about weddings. I HAVE had a fair number of blogs about the Tardis and Doctor Who in which I have mentioned blue any number of times and may have used it as a tag. Most often this happens in the blogs where I discuss the Tardis Project.

In fact, when I go to my all time summary of search terms, “Tardis” is the search that has most often brought people to me. To be completely accurate, out of all the Tardis searches it is Tardis Graph Paper that pulls people in.

Variations on twilight anesthesia are also common. I guess I’m not the only one who had an unpleasant experience when I was coming off the anesthesia.

My views have drastically dropped since WordPress isn’t sharing with Facebook in the manner it should. This has been more than a little disturbing for me. I didn’t think I cared about that until the numbers started dropping so terribly low.

When I see some of the odder countries, at least odd in relation to what I’m posting about, I wish they could tell me what was viewed. What did that person in Kenya read? How did that person in Singapore get routed to me? What have I talked about that Albanians find interesting?

I think stat’s page gives me just enough info to actually make me more curious and crave more information than it is capable of detailing.

Palm to Forehead, DOH!

Ever since the Game of Thrones was made into a TV show, I’ve been insisting I didn’t want to see it because I didn’t want it to ruin my image of the world it was set in. And I didn’t see how it could be done on t.v.

I’m killing some time at the book store prior to a movie and walk past a fantasy series. I stopped, took a step backwards and looked up at the top self. There was the first book of the series I THOUGHT Game of Thrones was based on. I thought it was the series name. It had a different series name. Not only that, it had a different author.

So I wander to the correct author, find a copy of book one, which is actually called Game of Thrones, and read the back of it. After the first sentence the original cover art pops into my head. Yes, I know this series. But I read it so long ago it is but a vague memory. I may still have book one someplace still.

The point is that I’ve spent the past couple years completely mixing up two very different series of books.