By
Lisabet Sarai
I'm writing this on
the 31st of March. Tomorrow morning, I will be embarking on a lengthy
journey, from my home in Asia to the east coast of the United States.
Optimistically, this means about 20 hours in the air, not to mention
waiting time, transfers and so on. If all goes according to schedule,
I'll arrive at my hotel in New York about 26 hours after I leave my
apartment.
Lengthy
plane flights aren't much fun, but living half a world away from my
family and many of my friends, I've learned to endure them. One of
the best ways to make the time fly (so to speak) is to lose oneself
in an engrossing book. For a trip like this, I tend to prefer one
long novel rather than several shorter books. I'm not likely to get
bored (I'll be too exhausted), and I don't have to use up valuable
carry-on luggage space with multiple volumes. The book should be
something with a lot of plot, something that doesn't demand too much
intellectual effort but which has enough excitement to keep me awake.
(I don’t like to read ebooks on a plane. I get a headache.)
In
preparation for this particular voyage, I bought a copy of A Game
of Thrones, the first book in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice
and Fire saga. I don't watch TV, so this is going to be mostly new to
me. Everything I've heard about the book and the series sounds
promising, though. Three dimensional characters, intriguing cultures,
a touch of magic, and lots of action. (Sex too, I gather...) And the
novel fits my external criteria; it's nearly 800 pages long, yet not
too heavy.
Fantasy—if
it's well-written and original—has
always been one of my favorite genres. In high school, I was totally
enthralled by Tolkein's Middle Earth. I knew it inside and out. I
even did my senior English thesis on that fictional world.
I
note that the book I discussed during our last "what are you
reading" cycle (Winter's Tale)
could also be categorized as a fantasy, as would the other book I
mentioned in that post, John Crowley's Little Big.
And I recall that on one of my most enjoyable (well, least aversive,
at least!) plane trips in recent years, I read Tigana
by Guy Gavriel Kay, another fat (650+ pages), juicy fantasy full of
creative ideas.
I'm
hopeful that The Game of Thrones
will be equally good. It's actually quite rare for me to explicitly
purchase a brand new paperback book. In fact, I tried to find a copy
in several used bookshops, without success, though I did find some of
the later volumes in the series. It occurred to me that this scarcity
might indicate that readers wanted to hold on to their volumes,
perhaps to read again. A good omen?
Wish
me luck! I won't be back until the third week in April. I'll catch up
on comments then.
Oh,
and for the trip home, I have Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.
A nice, meaty 900 pages!
