. Go into any Walmart store and you can pick up J.R.R. Martin's brick sized paperbacks for his A Song of Ice and Fire series line the small bookshelves. With HBO now finished with its second successful season of Game of Thrones, named for A Song of Ice and Fire's first novel, Game of Thrones has grown in success. With five published books in the medieval and mystical drama of warlords and dragon queens jockeying for their seat on the iron throne, the series shortest novel is around 800 pages, with each book growing in size and character number. Martin does an excellent job developing morally ambiguous characters with both good and evil in them and successfully mixes fiction and fantasy with realism in his very adult series. Why even Nathan Fillion (Castle, Firefly) jokingly bullies Martin for the next books in the series.
I began reading the series just after the first season of the show was released on dvd/bluray and was quickly engrossed. However, after reading the first novel and watching the first series, I found myself floundering in the second book. Knowing that I had four more long books to finish and that two more have yet to come out, I started to feel over-committed to the series. I had to take a break from the world of Game of Thrones. In a generation of too much stimulation, it is hard for even the most committed readers to stick to a long series. I'm sure I'll return to the world of Daenerys Taragaryen and Tyrion Lanniester (played on the show with flair by the award winning Peter Dinklage). I just hope I can weather the long read, and that its worth it. What popular books/shows have you tried to stick to but never fully managed?
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