Belated reading and delayed writing: Child 44 and Game of Thrones

Hello again. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But here we are again, this time pacing the boards in anticipation of MWF 2011. I’m very happy to be back here with Simon Keck and new MWF bloggers Jo Case and Stephanie Honor Convery; we’ll have an excellent time of it, I’m sure.

In the interim, I’ve been dividing my time between Oxford University Press, where I’m an editor; Kill Your Darlings, where I’m the Online Editor; writing about books here and there; and my online equivalent of a childhood house in the suburbs, 3000 BOOKS, where I try (with decreasing success) to record something about every book I read.

I have less and less time to stick to the project these days, but it’s a good little system. On the one hand, while my untidy mind is likely to forget the details of a novel just read, or even a short story twice read, the internet never forgets. (Just try googling “Billy Joel demo tape”.) But on the other hand – and the other hand never has anything nice up its sleeve – it’s mortifying to realise how slowly I get through books, and to books. For example, only this year did I read Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 Booker-longlisted Child 44 (Smith was a MWF guest in 2009). The third book in his Cold War-era thriller series about secret police member Leo Demidov is coming out next month in the UK. So, while Smith has managed to write two follow-up books in the intervening years, I’ve only managed to read one of them. Luckily someone has their priorities straight.

Speaking of follow-up books, I was recently intrigued by Laura Miller’s piece in the New Yorker about George R. R. Martin, author of the medieval politics-meets-fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. Titled ‘Just Write It!’, Miller’s piece describes several groups in Martin’s large and passionate fanbase, one faction of which has taken against the author for not yet having delivered the fifth book in the series (Martin predicts that there will eventually be seven books in total). The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was published in 2005.

That’s a pretty long wait. But of course, like a fool, I thought it would be a great idea to start reading the series regardless. I’m now halfway through the second book, but I have no idea why I would torture myself with the prospect of a perpetual cliffhanger, particularly in a series noted for its complexity and non-traditional reward–morality ratio. (Martin has said that the fifth book will be published in July this year, and a television series based on the books may provide some relief should the book not materialise.) Even more a fool, I want to finish the book (a mere dash at 744 pages) before I hop on a plane for New York this Thursday.

Anyhow, we’ll see how that goes. I’ll also be planning my holiday reading this week. I’m going to New York and Iceland, and am planning my book stash accordingly. More on that soon.