Sounds ominous.. For the near future I'm pretty sure most of my fave characters have plot armor that'll last a while though (Arya, Tyrion, Dany, Bran (yes I'm that one reader who doesn't think he's boring at all)) time will tell with Sam Tarly though.
NOBODY HAS PLOT ARMOUR! GRRM WILL KILL THEM ALL! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Not quite. Danaerys Targaryen most definitely does have plot armour! (she's actually the character I like the least, but I'm pretty sure she's going to be the overall winner)
My personal opinion is that the ending of the story will basically be: Westeros tears itself apart and every good guy dies, then Danaerys comes back as a saviour, kills all the bad guys, and makes everything okay in the end. I could be wrong, but that's my guess. :P
Also, Tyrion definitely has plot armour because if he dies then 90% of viewers will stop watching the TV show!
George has specifically said that every time someone says that Tyrion is their favourite character he gets one step closer to killing him(whether he is serious is up for debate). Also I don't think George really cares if killing Tyrion would drive off the TV audience, he just likes writing the books and it's not like he needs the money any more. I think that while Danaerys could do very well Sansa Stark will be very important (in what role I don't know). I also suspect that George might go for a really anticlimactic ending where: Everyone finally unites into one army (with dragons) to fight the White walkers and then the white walkers kill everyone anyway. That ending would be awesome and very in line with George's views about good always winning against evil in fiction. and while that ending would in some ways disappoint me (all those awesome characters dying) it would be a spectacular ending to an amazing saga.
My personal opinion is that the ending of the story will basically be: Westeros tears itself apart and every good guy dies, then Danaerys comes back as a saviour, kills all the bad guys, and makes everything okay in the end. I could be wrong, but that's my guess. :P
This is sort of in line with my guess so far. Also, wouldn't be surprised if Westoros splits in seven again. Whatever happens exactly, I think the power players in the end will be just trying to slowly rebuild an almost destroyed nation. Great, now I'm going to be binge reading it all evening.
[spoiler=from the 5th book]I think Danaerys is pretty f*cked considering the end of the last book (where she's sick and alone on the countryside with an angry dragon).[/spoiler] just my thoughts...
I think Danaerys is pretty f*cked considering the end of the last book (where she's sick and alone on the countryside with an angry dragon).
just my thoughts...
Nah,
she'll find some way to tame it and fly back to wherever she's needed just in time, and make a dramatic entry while everybody worships her, in a typical Mary Sue style.
Can you tell I don't like Danaerys very much? ;-)
Also, GRM might not care, but I'm sure HBO do...but yeah, GRM is pretty much made now, he doesn't even need to finish the series any more. In fact, he could probably hold the entire world to ransom! Imagine it:
GRM: "If you do not meet my demands, I will not finish the SoIaF series!" Pres. Obama: "Just give the man whatever he wants already!!" XD
I guess the question of whether to watch the show has pretty much been sorted out as I understand the show only goes through book 3 so far more or less. I just found out Feast for Crows will be leaving some of the characters behind until book 5. Not sure how I feel about this.
there were too many characters for him to write about so he had to split them up otherwise there would have been like ten chapters inbetween two chapters of one viewpoint
So I finally got a copy of "These Lawless Worlds #2: The Scales of Justice" and re-read it. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It wasn't completely great, but it wasn't horrible, either, so I'd recommend it. In the modern day, I'd say its readable, but nothing standout compared to modern romance novels/urban fantasy.
there were too many characters for him to write about so he had to split them up otherwise there would have been like ten chapters inbetween two chapters of one viewpoint
Well, so long as there's a Hodor pov chapter I'll be happy I guess.
Read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Not bad, but the main character is a bit too much of a ubermensch. I'm also getting tired of Fantasy writers (though this has spread beyond fantasy now) thinking that character development = trauma. Your protagonist doesn't need to beaten, broken, raped and have everyone he ever loved die in order to become more interesting.
Well, if we're just talking about some books we've read... I admit that I haven't been reading as much as an adult compared to my reading as a kid. That being said...
In the realm of "classics," you could check out "Men of Iron" by Howard Pyle. It doesn't feature magic, but it still feels like fantasy featuring a young man's journey to knighthood and the politics (and bullies) he must face along the way. It's an old book written anachronistically, so I won't call it an easy read.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, and while the books are a bit simple to an adult I still find "The Magician's Nephew," "The Silver Chair" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" to be fun reads. The Christian overtones don't ruin it for me (some people are so picky about removing real-world religion), and a few outdated concepts about women are surely no worse than suffering through Conan or Tarzan, and better than the total lack of female characters for authors like Lovecraft (Lewis usually has important primary female characters included, as well as the compellingly evil Jadis who becomes the White Witch, or the Witch of the Green Kirtle).
I read Dragonlance novels in my preteen and teenage years. I never came close to amassing the whole collection, but I put forth some effort and ended up reading about 20-someodd books. Some of the best were the collections of short stories, although I did follow the party of Tanis Half-Elven, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, etc. in their side quests and main storylines. So... are they good? I can't really say; I was young when I read them, and I have a backlog of new things to read before I start thinking about rereading Dragonlance novels. I will say that they entertained me as a teenager, and drove home the point that sometimes adventures don't always have happy endings. The tales about that group involving their five years apart are particularly bittersweet, if you ever read them.
It would be difficult to list all the fantasy novels I've read, I can't call them all to mind in one sitting. Oh, aside from just fantasy, I recommend you read "Empowered" by Adam Warren. The idea starts out a bit hokey in the first volume (and in many ways the universe remains ridiculous tongue-in-cheek satire), but weather on to the second issue and you will begin to understand why it is so good. How something so completely off-the-wall humorous can have the power to strike right to your heart with its serious moments. It's hard to describe; just read it.
Oh, right! Another classic series I read in my younger days is The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (you may recognize "The Black Cauldron" as one of the five books). They're good, read 'em.
Oh, and those remind me of another author I have enjoyed reading, Lawrence Watt-Evans. I've read "The Misenchanted Sword" and "With a Single Spell" by him, and I can say that they both entertained me enough that I'd be willing to give his other books a try.
I'm also getting tired of Fantasy writers (though this has spread beyond fantasy now) thinking that character development = trauma. Your protagonist doesn't need to beaten, broken, raped and have everyone he ever loved die in order to become more interesting.
QFT! Some people just aren't very good at developing characters.
Speaking of authors who are poor at developing characters, I read the Hunger Games books a while back. While the concept is good, and the first book is good, Katniss Everdeen comes dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. The author's idea of balacing a character's amazing abilities with flaws seems to be telling the reader that the character has a flaw, but then writing the story in such a way that it doesn't impact her in any way.
@LordRumfish Thanks for reminding me about Lawrence Watt-Evans' books - I'd completely forgotten about them and will now give them a re-read.
P.S. Can anyone remember the name of the very tongue-in-the-cheek fantasy novel which features, amongst other characters, a dwarf (I think) whose gender-differentiating appendage is shaped like a corkscrew (a racial trait in this scenario)? His unfortunately, has a left-handed thread and he spends most of the book looking for a female of the same species who can accommodate him. (I bought it from Forbidden Planet, London in 1978 and have since lost it)
Given that I've emigrated three times in my life (UK to SA, SA to NZ, NZ to UK) and had to trim my book collection down to the bare bones each time (when I left SA I gave >1500 books to a charity shop), if you could only keep three books, which would they be (trilogies etc. count as one book)?
Mine would be: LotR The Fionavar Tapestry (Guy Gavriel Kay) Shogun (James Clavell)
Do trilogies of trilogies count as one? if so: Farseer/Liveship/Tawny man trilogies (Robin Hobb) A song of ice and fire (GRRM) Lord of the rings trilogy (Tolkien)
@wubble Winds of Winter book 2: A Hodor of Hodor's. I kind of want GRRM to release that just to watch the internet explode. ^^
Idk 3 is too few for me. I guess I'd keep three that would be very hard to replace but in the spirit of the question: LoTR is the only book I regularly reread. ASoIaF has just kept growing on me as I go on, and I'm still reading it so yeah. Too many favorite novels to choose just 1 from (Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Hitchhiker's Guide, 1984, Old man and the Sea etc.) so I'll cheat and keep the collected works of Shakespeare.
Just kidding...I'll go for Don Quixote, the Lord of the Rings trology, and the entire Horus Heresy series, including the ones that haven't been written yet (it's all part of the same series, so it counts!! )
Yeah, I have an iPad an use it to read a lot (mostly about programming, but I am reading 1984 there too), but still, nothing compares to a real book (it's like digital copies vs. boxed editions when it comes to video games).
Speaking of Don Quixote, that reminds me of the student who wrote that he was reading, "Donkey Hote".
@demented I know a romance novelist who does that. Her male heroes are always the product of a childhood/young adulthood where they were hated, abused, betrayed, and beaten down so badly that they cannot even imagine themselves as someone anyone would want to be with- and she keeps using this trope, so that the next male hero has to have it even WORSE than the last one. Flanderizing out the ying-yang, if you know what I mean. And it's exhausting to read. Every time I pick up one of her books, I have to take a deep breath and prepare myself for what's coming next. And yeah, I know I could stop reading her, but I do generally like the books and the stories she tells- it's just getting REALLY OLD. (Sherrilyn Kenyon, BTW).
As for reading as a younger person, I was really into Andre Norton as a younger reader. I think I got started in High Scholl reading "Voorloper", and I just devoured everything the school had of hers (some of her Witch World stuff and some of her SF). She's still one of my favorite writers- I am trying to collect everything she ever wrote, including her romance novels, westerns, sci-fi and fantasy (yeah, she wrote in a LOT of genres). If I had to pick one novel by her to save, it would be Quag Keep, which starts out with a gaming group getting a lot of new figurines from a new company who wants them to test them out, and ends up with the spirit of the gamer who picked a particular figurine being trapped (perhaps forever) in the body of his character, along with a bunch of gamers from other groups who did likewise. The ending is left in doubt- the adventurers defeat the wizard/sorceror who was making these figurers to trap gamers, but the characters stay who they are, with bracelets of dice around their wrists. But at the end, they decide to roll the dice for themselves and see what happens- and the book ends there. There is a "sequel" called "Return to Quag Keep", but just read the original novel and forget about the second one. Really.
Because the collection is coming out on December 9th, I'm going to shamelessly advertise one of my most recent and favorite authors and her Inheritance Trilogy.
It has everything that I like in fantasy. Gods, magic, politics, romance, strong female characters, and it gets bonus points for having a diverse cast written by an African-American woman. I mean, if that's important to you, great. If it's not, they're still great books. There's no losing on this one. XD
As far as my reading habits go, I'm twenty-two years old and I still read a lot of young adult. I love the genre, I love that age group, and I intend to publish young adult novels of my own one day, so reading in my chosen genre can only help!
Nowadays I'm a huge fan of the Graceling books by Kristin Cashore, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and the Seven Realms novels by Cinda Williams Chima. I devoured The Rangers Apprentice series as a kid (John Flannagan) and the Great Tree of Avalon books (T.A. Barron). Been meaning to reread Tamora Pierce's books since I read them so long ago that I don't remember most of them, except that they were good too.
My mother has a list of favorites of her own. Anything by Carol Berg, Mercedes Lackey, Robin Hobb, and S.M. Stirling. The first three are very well-known epic fantasy writers while the last one deals with magical post-apocalyptic. One of those "technology-dies-but-magic-comes-back" type of worlds.
*sigh* So many books I have yet to read... And there's still not enough time in the day. ;_;
@Nonnahswriter Tamora Pierce is great. I especially love some of her later novels, like the Bekah Cooper series (she's George Cooper, the Thief Lord from the Alanna series ancestress). Her Wild Mage series has a bit of controversy around it, because of the ages of the two main characters who end up getting together (not having sex, but a relationship. Sex and kids (no marriage AFAIAA) come later. But the girl, Daine, is young, and the man, Numair, is in his early to middle 30's. So a ton of people got all farklempt over the age difference between them. Me, not so much. It's not like they are shagging, after all. Just in love.
I've been reading a lot of other series in YA. I read Ruby Red, Sapphire Blue, Emerald Green series by Kristin Gier- the first two books were okay, the last one suffered a lot from high expectations that weren't borne out, and the fact that the series was apparently translated into English from the German. I felt the last book could have used a lot more editing to make it better. In fact, it needed an editor (or a *better* editor) badly.
I've been enjoying Sherrilyn Kenyon's Nick series, but you kind of have to read her adult romance novels for a lot of it to make sense and know who these characters are. And for that matter, why Nick, the adult, is trying so desperately to change his own history. Long story short is, Nick is the son of a demon, the last/only of its kind, with the power to end the world. He is the only one of his Demon race to be raised by a kind and loving mother, and if his father dies, Nick is going to have all the baggage of his Dad's race dumped on his head. If he loses his humanity, he *will* end the world. And in the adult novels, his mother was killed, which turned him full demon and he is now in the process of doing just that. But he's trying to save his mom and with her, himself, by going back in time to change his life as a teenager. It's an interesting series, as other demons from other demonic races (and pantheons) are all fighting over him. Some want to kill him and claim his power for themselves. Others want to turn him full-on demon so that he will go ahead and destroy the world. But if he goes full-on Demon, he can never go back to being the boy he was, so… DRAMS!
I haven't read "The Hunger Games" or "Divergent", but I have seen a ton of imitators come down the pike. This has made me reluctant to even start with either series, as I have a feeling these post-Apocalyptic "Teens fight against each other for the future of the world!" series are going to become played out rather quickly. (the most annoying ones even copy/paste the imagery of the series they are imitating… Come on, guys, lazy much?!)
Comments
NOBODY HAS PLOT ARMOUR! GRRM WILL KILL THEM ALL! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
My personal opinion is that the ending of the story will basically be: Westeros tears itself apart and every good guy dies, then Danaerys comes back as a saviour, kills all the bad guys, and makes everything okay in the end. I could be wrong, but that's my guess. :P
Also, Tyrion definitely has plot armour because if he dies then 90% of viewers will stop watching the TV show!
I think that while Danaerys could do very well Sansa Stark will be very important (in what role I don't know).
I also suspect that George might go for a really anticlimactic ending where:
Everyone finally unites into one army (with dragons) to fight the White walkers and then the white walkers kill everyone anyway. That ending would be awesome and very in line with George's views about good always winning against evil in fiction. and while that ending would in some ways disappoint me (all those awesome characters dying) it would be a spectacular ending to an amazing saga.
Great, now I'm going to be binge reading it all evening.
Can you tell I don't like Danaerys very much? ;-)
Also, GRM might not care, but I'm sure HBO do...but yeah, GRM is pretty much made now, he doesn't even need to finish the series any more. In fact, he could probably hold the entire world to ransom! Imagine it:
GRM: "If you do not meet my demands, I will not finish the SoIaF series!"
Pres. Obama: "Just give the man whatever he wants already!!" XD
I haven't been reading too much fantasy/sci-fi books lately. I'm caught up on non-fiction lately.
In the realm of "classics," you could check out "Men of Iron" by Howard Pyle. It doesn't feature magic, but it still feels like fantasy featuring a young man's journey to knighthood and the politics (and bullies) he must face along the way. It's an old book written anachronistically, so I won't call it an easy read.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, and while the books are a bit simple to an adult I still find "The Magician's Nephew," "The Silver Chair" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" to be fun reads. The Christian overtones don't ruin it for me (some people are so picky about removing real-world religion), and a few outdated concepts about women are surely no worse than suffering through Conan or Tarzan, and better than the total lack of female characters for authors like Lovecraft (Lewis usually has important primary female characters included, as well as the compellingly evil Jadis who becomes the White Witch, or the Witch of the Green Kirtle).
I read Dragonlance novels in my preteen and teenage years. I never came close to amassing the whole collection, but I put forth some effort and ended up reading about 20-someodd books. Some of the best were the collections of short stories, although I did follow the party of Tanis Half-Elven, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, etc. in their side quests and main storylines. So... are they good? I can't really say; I was young when I read them, and I have a backlog of new things to read before I start thinking about rereading Dragonlance novels. I will say that they entertained me as a teenager, and drove home the point that sometimes adventures don't always have happy endings. The tales about that group involving their five years apart are particularly bittersweet, if you ever read them.
It would be difficult to list all the fantasy novels I've read, I can't call them all to mind in one sitting. Oh, aside from just fantasy, I recommend you read "Empowered" by Adam Warren. The idea starts out a bit hokey in the first volume (and in many ways the universe remains ridiculous tongue-in-cheek satire), but weather on to the second issue and you will begin to understand why it is so good. How something so completely off-the-wall humorous can have the power to strike right to your heart with its serious moments. It's hard to describe; just read it.
Oh, right! Another classic series I read in my younger days is The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (you may recognize "The Black Cauldron" as one of the five books). They're good, read 'em.
Oh, and those remind me of another author I have enjoyed reading, Lawrence Watt-Evans. I've read "The Misenchanted Sword" and "With a Single Spell" by him, and I can say that they both entertained me enough that I'd be willing to give his other books a try.
That's enough for now, I think.
Speaking of authors who are poor at developing characters, I read the Hunger Games books a while back. While the concept is good, and the first book is good, Katniss Everdeen comes dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. The author's idea of balacing a character's amazing abilities with flaws seems to be telling the reader that the character has a flaw, but then writing the story in such a way that it doesn't impact her in any way.
P.S. Can anyone remember the name of the very tongue-in-the-cheek fantasy novel which features, amongst other characters, a dwarf (I think) whose gender-differentiating appendage is shaped like a corkscrew (a racial trait in this scenario)? His unfortunately, has a left-handed thread and he spends most of the book looking for a female of the same species who can accommodate him.
(I bought it from Forbidden Planet, London in 1978 and have since lost it)
Given that I've emigrated three times in my life (UK to SA, SA to NZ, NZ to UK) and had to trim my book collection down to the bare bones each time (when I left SA I gave >1500 books to a charity shop), if you could only keep three books, which would they be (trilogies etc. count as one book)?
Mine would be:
LotR
The Fionavar Tapestry (Guy Gavriel Kay)
Shogun (James Clavell)
Faust (J. W. Goethe).
The Simarillion or the Children of Húrin (J. R. R. Tolkien).
if so:
Farseer/Liveship/Tawny man trilogies (Robin Hobb)
A song of ice and fire (GRRM)
Lord of the rings trilogy (Tolkien)
Idk 3 is too few for me. I guess I'd keep three that would be very hard to replace but in the spirit of the question:
LoTR is the only book I regularly reread.
ASoIaF has just kept growing on me as I go on, and I'm still reading it so yeah.
Too many favorite novels to choose just 1 from (Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Hitchhiker's Guide, 1984, Old man and the Sea etc.) so I'll cheat and keep the collected works of Shakespeare.
Just kidding...I'll go for Don Quixote, the Lord of the Rings trology, and the entire Horus Heresy series, including the ones that haven't been written yet (it's all part of the same series, so it counts!!
eta: I wonder if he'll do that on April Fools' Day...now THAT would be funny!!
1) Diaspora (Greg Egan)
2) Ring (Stephen Baxter)
3) Feersum Endjinn (Iain M. Banks)
@demented I know a romance novelist who does that. Her male heroes are always the product of a childhood/young adulthood where they were hated, abused, betrayed, and beaten down so badly that they cannot even imagine themselves as someone anyone would want to be with- and she keeps using this trope, so that the next male hero has to have it even WORSE than the last one. Flanderizing out the ying-yang, if you know what I mean. And it's exhausting to read. Every time I pick up one of her books, I have to take a deep breath and prepare myself for what's coming next. And yeah, I know I could stop reading her, but I do generally like the books and the stories she tells- it's just getting REALLY OLD. (Sherrilyn Kenyon, BTW).
As for reading as a younger person, I was really into Andre Norton as a younger reader. I think I got started in High Scholl reading "Voorloper", and I just devoured everything the school had of hers (some of her Witch World stuff and some of her SF). She's still one of my favorite writers- I am trying to collect everything she ever wrote, including her romance novels, westerns, sci-fi and fantasy (yeah, she wrote in a LOT of genres). If I had to pick one novel by her to save, it would be Quag Keep, which starts out with a gaming group getting a lot of new figurines from a new company who wants them to test them out, and ends up with the spirit of the gamer who picked a particular figurine being trapped (perhaps forever) in the body of his character, along with a bunch of gamers from other groups who did likewise. The ending is left in doubt- the adventurers defeat the wizard/sorceror who was making these figurers to trap gamers, but the characters stay who they are, with bracelets of dice around their wrists. But at the end, they decide to roll the dice for themselves and see what happens- and the book ends there. There is a "sequel" called "Return to Quag Keep", but just read the original novel and forget about the second one. Really.
http://nkjemisin.com/books/the-inheritance-trilogy/
It has everything that I like in fantasy. Gods, magic, politics, romance, strong female characters, and it gets bonus points for having a diverse cast written by an African-American woman. I mean, if that's important to you, great. If it's not, they're still great books. There's no losing on this one. XD
As far as my reading habits go, I'm twenty-two years old and I still read a lot of young adult. I love the genre, I love that age group, and I intend to publish young adult novels of my own one day, so reading in my chosen genre can only help!
Nowadays I'm a huge fan of the Graceling books by Kristin Cashore, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, and the Seven Realms novels by Cinda Williams Chima. I devoured The Rangers Apprentice series as a kid (John Flannagan) and the Great Tree of Avalon books (T.A. Barron). Been meaning to reread Tamora Pierce's books since I read them so long ago that I don't remember most of them, except that they were good too.
My mother has a list of favorites of her own. Anything by Carol Berg, Mercedes Lackey, Robin Hobb, and S.M. Stirling. The first three are very well-known epic fantasy writers while the last one deals with magical post-apocalyptic. One of those "technology-dies-but-magic-comes-back" type of worlds.
*sigh* So many books I have yet to read... And there's still not enough time in the day. ;_;
I've been reading a lot of other series in YA. I read Ruby Red, Sapphire Blue, Emerald Green series by Kristin Gier- the first two books were okay, the last one suffered a lot from high expectations that weren't borne out, and the fact that the series was apparently translated into English from the German. I felt the last book could have used a lot more editing to make it better. In fact, it needed an editor (or a *better* editor) badly.
I've been enjoying Sherrilyn Kenyon's Nick series, but you kind of have to read her adult romance novels for a lot of it to make sense and know who these characters are. And for that matter, why Nick, the adult, is trying so desperately to change his own history. Long story short is, Nick is the son of a demon, the last/only of its kind, with the power to end the world. He is the only one of his Demon race to be raised by a kind and loving mother, and if his father dies, Nick is going to have all the baggage of his Dad's race dumped on his head. If he loses his humanity, he *will* end the world. And in the adult novels, his mother was killed, which turned him full demon and he is now in the process of doing just that. But he's trying to save his mom and with her, himself, by going back in time to change his life as a teenager. It's an interesting series, as other demons from other demonic races (and pantheons) are all fighting over him. Some want to kill him and claim his power for themselves. Others want to turn him full-on demon so that he will go ahead and destroy the world. But if he goes full-on Demon, he can never go back to being the boy he was, so… DRAMS!
I haven't read "The Hunger Games" or "Divergent", but I have seen a ton of imitators come down the pike. This has made me reluctant to even start with either series, as I have a feeling these post-Apocalyptic "Teens fight against each other for the future of the world!" series are going to become played out rather quickly. (the most annoying ones even copy/paste the imagery of the series they are imitating… Come on, guys, lazy much?!)