Some exciting news for nerds everywhere who have been hypnotized by George R R Martin (like Molly: so sad…all she does is sit in front of a stack of his books, whimpering): A Dance With Dragons (and yes, I DID cringe while writing that, it’s not a great title) has a publication date. July of this very year! Between now and then, Molly plans to totally earn her enormous indulgence by reading some Important Books:
She WILL get to The Unbearable Lightness of Being
She WILL buy and read In Other Rooms Other Wonders, because once, she sat in a bookstore and read the first ten pages of that and it was luminous and delicious and available on Kindle.
She WILL read all the books from my MFA reading list. She never quite seems to get around to the stage and screen texts, because she secretly hates The Theatre, but she understands that this is stupid and makes exceptions for Shakespeare and Martin McDonagh.
She WILL finish Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
She WILL get The Emigrants back from my father and read it.
She WILL continue to listen to PD James’s and Tana French’s excellent mysteries, because nothing else gets one through a long car ride in such style.
She WILL, once again, try to read Swann’s Way. Her yearly exercise in futility and boredom is once again upon us. One of these years though, she’s totally going to GET IT and just read right through to the end without nodding off every three lines.
Molly’s recently done a little bit of obsessive, frantic googling online research to figure out when the next book in Martin’s series comes out, and discovered that many people have been complaining about the fact that it has taken George R R Martin like six years to finish a thousand page plus book. And by complaining, I mean hurling fiery words of hatred like “you’re old and fat and you need to finish this series before you die”. These people need to stop. First of all, look at him:
People are yelling at a teddy-bear-person, and Molly, for one, is not ok with that. She could bite someone’s face off! Or bark a lot and cower behind her Ana! Whichever! Secondly, George is clearly a writer with ambitions and talent that transcend his much-maligned genre. Molly has the sense that he wants to write something of lasting quality, rather than a disposable book that will have been totally forgotten in a year, displaced by whatever stale iteration of boy-with-magic-sword somebody comes up with next. And that kind of thing takes time. Which Molly is happy to wait.
Seriously, come on.