Category: play

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screen

Luther – Season One

Idris Elba rocked The Wire. Who knew he was a British stage and screen actor? Not me. But G and I are stuck on the watch it now content from the BBC with our streaming only Netflix plan so we are slowly discovering this stuff. Elba plays Luther, a London cop with anger management issues and a general disdain for authority.

I’m baffled a little by the pop-culture norms of the UK. I think of the BBC as something akin to PBS: Not-for-profit and devoted to education and the arts. Clearly I’m wrong about that education and arts part because this is a graphic, violent cop show that feels more like something you see on HBO or Showtime in the US, sans naked people.

It’s full of nasty, twisted murderers and intense action scenes. Oh yeah, and they’re not afraid to kill off key characters. I don’t watch any current network TV shows in the US so I’m not that informed on what’s out there, but this doesn’t feel like free TV in America. These BBC people are doing whatever they want and they’re doing it with taxpayer dollars. Aren’t they? Maybe not. When you’re looking at things from a global perspective, BBC America may be for profit. I don’t get it, but I don’t really care.

The first season was six episodes and the second season is four episodes. They’re more like miniseries than they are serialized shows. The last episode of season one ended with quite a cliffhanger so G and I are fired up to get this going again.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

Luther, much like Stringer, is an imposing force. Both characters know what the end result should be and are not afraid to buck the system and embrace new methods. Stringer was a drug dealer who went to business school and tried to use Robert’s Rules of Order to run meetings with drug kingpins. Luther is a cop who’s not afraid to team up with sadistic murderers if it’s the quickest method to crack a case. Same but different. Both badasses.

Elba may be the only way I’ll be able to get G to watch The Wire. She seems smitten with the guy’s screen presence.

Categories
books

Brave Dragons

I read one or two pieces of basketball nonfiction per year. This book is a mix of basketball and current affairs. It’s the story of a year in the life of the Shanxi Brave Dragons basketball team with occasional diversions into Chinese politics, history, and culture. Basketball is a great vehicle to give the reader a glimpse of the inner workings of China because it takes something distinctly American, something we can relate to, and charts its integration into Chinese culture.

The author, a foreign correspondent for the NYT, is basketball fan/Pulitzer prize co-winner Jim Yardley (stationed in China at the time, now in India I think). The team owner of the Brave Dragons, Boss Wang, gave Yardley insider access to the team as they tried to dig themselves out of the cellar of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) by hiring an American coach named Bob Weiss.

It’s been a decade since Yao Ming first entered the NBA so you may have the feeling that basketball is kind of advanced in China, that maybe it’s free of corruption and played in shiny new stadiums like the ones we saw in the Beijing Olympics. Ah, no. There’s plenty of corruption and anything shiny in the stadiums eventually becomes dingy from all the cigarette smoke.

Basketball is managed by the state, like most things in China, and they start the managing early. Here’s what happens with kids:

The winnowing tool is the X‑ray machine. In elementary school, children undergo medical tests that include a scan of their skeletal structure, with special attention paid to their wrist bones. Doctors examine the distance between the developing bones, and that distance provides a projection for future physical growth. Kids deemed likeliest to grow the tallest are encouraged to attend government sports schools, where coaches will steer them toward certain sports, like basketball. Other kids, the ones showing narrower spaces in the bone structure of their wrists, continue attending schools focused on academics, many of which offer no team sports whatsoever. (Kindle loc. 411–15)

If you’re lucky enough to make it to the CBA, you’ll get a place to lay your head, practice your craft, and hang out with plenty of cool people:

The Chinese players slept inside a three-story concrete dormitory painted burnt orange. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were taken in a canteen on the first floor. The gym was an old warehouse, as high as a barn and constructed with sheet metal. (Kindle loc. 570–72)

But man, these guys are so thankful to be playing the game. The work hard and don’t complain. In fact, they have an overriding feeling that the only way they can compete internationally is to outwork the competition because they feel that they are genetically inferior to the rest of the world. The Brave Dragons coach, Liu Tie, tried to explain this to the author and the conversation became uncomfortable quickly.

I realized we were having a strange conversation, or at least a conversation that would run roughshod over political correctness parameters in the United States. Garrison had been helping with some interpretation, and he rolled his eyes when Liu digressed onto the kung fu warriors. Yet nothing that Liu had said was considered outside mainstream thought in China. Even as the rest of the world regarded China as a rising power, as the country most likely to dominate this century, most Chinese regarded themselves as genetically deficient, at least individually. Mobilizing the masses, not inspiring individuals, had always been the priority of the Chinese leaders. The X-rays and bone tests conducted on Chinese boys like Pan Jiang and Big Sun were a systematic response rooted in assumptions of physical inferiority. No country on earth believed in Darwin more than China. (Kindle loc. 903–909)

Wow, it’s a whole society that won’t accept no for an answer, that’s ready to do anything it takes to dominate the world. Yardley also spent time in India and has this observation:

Ask an Indian intellectual in New Delhi why the capital’s libraries are mediocre or their infrastructure was poorly built and he might shrug and say, “We Indians are not especially good at that.” The Chinese, or at least their leaders, could not accept such a lack of ambition or national will; for China to reclaim its place in the world, China must be great at every endeavor. Yet the price was that daily life was a grinding stone. Everyone worked hard, often separated from family, as rebuilding and rebranding Chinese greatness was a round-the-clock enterprise. (Kindle loc. 4244–48)

So will China ever be a power in basketball like they are in manufacturing? I don’t know, the sport just may take too much creativity and artistry, things that can’t be mandated by the state very well. And each team needs a star, or two. The stats are pretty formidable, you don’t win without a superstar, which is antithetical to the Chinese collective way.

Bob Weiss had an impossible time installing any sort of American style into the Brave Dragons. In fact, after only a week he was demoted to a “consultant” and replaced by Liu Tie, his assistant. Then he was reinstated, then he was moved back to a consultant. It was quite a soap opera. But Weiss and his wife fell in love with China.

Weiss wanted to meet Prada, too. Because if J. T. Prada was angling to get back to the NBA, Bob Weiss had decided he wanted to stay in China. He was having a ball. Tracy loved it. She could even imagine returning to Taiyuan for the following season, though Weiss had a harder time imagining that. He was curious about other teams, other possibilities, and Prada knew people. (Kindle loc. 4882–5)

That’s cool. Weiss seems like a good guy. Yardley paints a detailed picture of him and many other characters. He delves into the lives of players and management but doesn’t stop there. Heck, he even spends a holiday weekend with the teams DJ.

I love basketball. I have a few basketball books queued up. This Thunder vs Heat series is awesome. I gotta get back to it.

Categories
screen

Arrested Development – Season One

This is funny stuff. It’s cool, funny stuff. It’s so wry and obtuse and, dare I say, edgy, that you can’t help but feel like you could hang out with the cool people who constantly spew out quotes from cutting edge comedies. Of course you can’t, but you can still watch this cancelled show, a decade after it was cool, on your iPhone, during stolen 22 minutes blocks of your life.

I’m channeling myself, sorry.

As far as comedic notes go, this hits them all for me. It’s not for everybody though. My wife gets bored fast. We don’t share many of the same tastes in comedy. Drama is another story.

When they played Taking Care of Business as the background music for burning down the banana stand or when Henry Winkler started to comb his hair in the bathroom mirror and pulled a Fonzy move, I got very satisfying chuckles. I didn’t get huge, uncontrollable laughs and I didn’t feel a burning urge to rush through this. Heck, it took my like six months to get through all 23 episodes.

But every episode was fun and inventive. It was very comforting to know that I had a stack of 20 minute time-wasters in my pocket at any time. Talk about an escape – a mental break – this was it for me in the first half of this year.

Categories
music

The Big Bach Set – Various Artists

I grabbed this after seeing it on Andy Ihnatko’s Twitter feed. I trust him on a variety of topics, like computers, cameras, and mobile devices. I follow him because he tells me stuff I need to know or stuff I’m interested in regarding various digitalia. He gets paid for doing this, by the Sun Times and by Twit.tv, but I feel like he answers to a higher calling.

I’ve never heard Mr. Ihnatko discuss why he puts links to deals on classical music in his feed. I’m assuming it’s because he likes it. Whether he truly appreciates classical music or whether he uses it for background noise doesn’t really matter to me, I’m just thankful for the tips, because cheap is important for my purposes.

I just need background music, man, for the most part, but I feel the urge to dig a little deeper. About a decade ago I got a Handel CD from somewhere and just wore it out while working. I loved it, but can’t really tell you why. That’s a trend in my life I’m trying to end. I want to be able to give reasons for everything that I like, thus, this.

So now I pop on this Big Bach Set of 120 songs and try and decipher the very Bachian nature of this thing. Heck, it was $0.99, at least for that day, so it was a low risk purchase that I can tool around with without any buyer’s remorse. I’m going to start with the Wikipedia page and go from there.

Or maybe I’ll just play it and forget it, hoping it will sink in enough without any effort that I suddenly start to recognize Bach chords at weddings, funerals, or on TV news programs. But what if I do start learning the nuances of Bach’s music? Then I can’t use it as background music anymore because I’ll be thinking about the music, bringing it in to the front of my mind, so it’s not background music any more.

That seems to defeat the purpose. Hmm. I’ve just talked myself into one big circle. I’m out, we ain’t going around again.

Categories
books

Mexico Set

This is the second book in the game, set, and match trilogy by Len Deighton, which is the first trilogy of the nine-volume Bernard Samson series. It’s classic, Cold War, British spy stuff. It’s a big undertaking and it’s going to take me a while to get through this, but I’m savoring it.

This book picks right up at the end of Berlin Game. Samson is dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s defection to Moscow, juggling job stress and family stress. His work task: get a high ranking KGB man to defect right out from under his wife’s nose. His personal task: find a way to take care of his two kids and protect them from his wife while warding off advances from two beautiful women.

It’s a great mix of spy craft and drama. So far it feels a little simpler and lighter than Le Carre’s Smiley series, but has comparable character development. There’s a lot of detail on Samson and I think he’s a little more approachable than Smiley. I’ll be able to talk more about this after reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (targeting late June).

**  PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW  **

Samson proved highly fallible in this book, almost ruining certain scenes. Twice he was duped by an attractive woman; in both cases I knew as soon as the women entered the scene. I felt kind of let down by the ease with which he was taken in. It’s a theme though that runs through Samson’s character, he is constantly confronted with women he can’t read correctly.

It adds an interesting dimension to Samson and makes the books a lot of fun. Deighton couldn’t pull it off though if he didn’t build some solid intrigue, which he does very well. The tension around who’s on who’s side in this game of spies doesn’t take a back seat to anything, all of the other fun stuff is just icing on the cake. The ending is packed with double crosses and epic spy stuff, truly unique batch of trickery played by all sides of the game. Awesome.

I have London Match queued up, which I purchased via Abe Books (like this one). I don’t think I’ll be able to hold off much past the end of summer. By the way, Abe Books is awesome for old books – cheap and reliable.

Categories
food

Table 52

Hummingbird Cake at Table 52

My sister is the frosting queen of Northwest Ohio. Her secret: Crisco. That may sound kind of repulsive to those who didn’t grow up with a can of Crisco on the counter like we did. To me, it sounds like a great way to add some density and texture to one of life’s small pleasures – frosting.

Yep, frosting-love is a curse of the Steffens. I was home a few weeks ago and found myself spreading my sister’s frosting on some cheap shortbread cookies and it transformed each cookie into a religious experience. It reminded me of a food item I had about a month ago that did not need any transforming, but the frosting still really stood out. That’s it in the picture – Art Smith’s Hummingbird Cake from Table 52 (note to self, when cheap shortbread cookies and Crisco remind you of a masterpiece by Oprah’s former chef it could mean something is horribly wrong with your tastebuds).

Smith’s dessert was described on the menu as such:

Banana-Pineapple Cake, Cream Cheese Frosting

That’s a big turn-off for me. I don’t like fruit in my cake. Period. I was on the brink of getting the chocolate cake thing or the pecan pie thing, but this was a special occasion (late Valentine’s Day dinner with G) and the wait staff did a good job of selling the fact that the fruit was “added only for moisture and sweetness, you don’t taste it all.”

In the end, I went with the Hummingbird and I’m glad I did. Actually, I was glad for three days because it lasted three separate sittings and held up very well in the takeout container. Yes, that’s two sittings of just shoveling it in right from the takeout container after dinner.

It’s kind of carrot-cakish but better. It has more brown notes, like a caramelish and brown sugar type of flavor. And despite the thickness of the frosting, it was light enough that it didn’t ruin the cake/frosting ratio and stood up to being hauled around in a takeout container and pawed at for three days. It just works and has completely changed my view of fruit in cakes.

I was so smitten that I’ve started asking southern folk about the Hummingbird Cake in my efforts to bond with them using something other than college football. Here’s the thing though, I’ve asked no less than four people from Georgia and South Carolina and they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t get it, if you Google this thing Paula Deen is all over it. Oh well, maybe it’s not as southern as I thought.

This makes me wonder if I’m tapped in to food from my region. If you ask me about deep dish pizza, hotdogs, cherry pie, and Italian beef, I’m going to have something to say. I guess I can’t think of anything else really. There are probably a whole host of things that people identify as midwest/Chicago food that would make me say, “Huh?” Test me.

Oh well, it was a great cake.

Categories
books

The Ox-Bow Incident

I finished the last two chapters of this book on a plane coming back from Charlotte on a business trip. The flight was half empty and I was seated behind two drunk guys on their way to a bachelor party in Chicago. As I was sitting there in quiet contemplation, the guys in front of me engaged in a long and sometimes animated discussion about Trayvon Martin, Robert Zimmerman, and vigilante justice.

It was a strange confluence of events that forced me to think harder about this book.

If you’re not familiar with the story, you need to know right off the bat that this is generally regarded as the greatest Western novel ever. As a kid, I read a lot of Westerns, so this reading experience really hit home for me. It’s an incredible read and very appropriate for current times.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

The story takes place over about 48 hours in 1885 and chronicles a doomed hunt for three murderers by a 28-person posse from a small cowtown in Nevada. It’s told from the perspective of a cowboy in the posse named Art Croft, a sensitive and thoughtful person but a man ill-equipped for the deed at hand. He’s a perfect vehicle to tell the story.

It’s a short book, maybe 240 pages depending on the format. It’s broken down into five longer-than-average chapters. They aren’t titled, but if they were, I’d title them like this:

  1. The Saloon
  2. The Posse
  3. The Hunt
  4. The Hanging
  5. The Saloon Again

I read it over the course of a week in four sessions, the last two chapters being a single session. You’d have to be one heartless human to stop after Chapter Four, or just someone with serious time constraints.

This book points out the the evils and perils of the mob mentality and vigilante justice, but it goes deeper. One of the subtler topics Walter Van Tillburg Clark explores is the moral implication of doing the right thing. I’ll use a scene in the book to clarify so you don’t think I’m full of $^|+.

During formation of the posse, the ensuing hunt, and the hanging, there was one man who campaigned tirelessly to cease the charade of justice and bring the suspects back to town to be tried. His name was Davies and he was the local shopkeeper. Davies did everything he could; he got the local judge out of his office to try and stop the posse from going out, he confronted the leader of the posse and tried to reason with him, and he begged other posse members to see his point of view to try and build consensus for stopping the hangings.

Nothing worked. Three men were hanged and their innocence was discovered only moments later on the way back to town.

The aftermath is ugly. The son of the leader of the posse hangs himself when he gets back to town. His father, Tetley, commits suicide by impaling himself on his own sword shortly after hearing of his son’s death. A local rancher promises to take care of the widow and children of one of the hanged.

The reader, I think, finds these pretty meaningless. I still had a sickening feeling for the injustice done to the suspects because it could not be undone. Davies has the same feeling, but he also has a more complicated set of emotions. He feels a tremendous, crushing guilt in his cowardice.

What? Croft, the narrator, is incredulous and tries to talk Davies down from this. Croft expresses that Davies was the only one talking sense and the only one standing up to the leader Tetley, he should feel anything but guilt because he did all he could.

Davies doesn’t feel the same way. He knew the suspects were innocent. He just knew. He also knew that only way he could stop the hanging was to kill the leader Tetley. His guilt resulted from the feeling of relief he felt for not bringing his gun. He was relieved that he didn’t have to make the hard decision to do the only thing that could have saved three innocent men, kill Tetley.

“Yes, you see now, don’t you?” he said in a low voice. “I had everything, justice, pity, even the backing – and I knew it – and I let those three men hang because I was afraid. The lowest kind of virtue, the quality dogs have when they need it, the only thing Tetley had, guts, plain guts, and I didn’t have it.”

…

“All a great, cowardly lie,” he [Davies] said violently. “All pose; empty, gutless pretense. All the time the truth was I didn’t take a gun because I didn’t want it to come down to a showdown. The weakness that was in me all the time set up my sniveling little defense. I didn’t even expect to save those men. The most I hoped was that something would do it for me.” (pg 234)

Wow man, this blew me away. It was an ultra intense scene in the book and it reminded me immediately of the feeling I had after reading the Pat Tillman book. This feeling that some people just hold themselves to a higher standard.

I felt like Davies was a hero but Tillman, like Davies himself, would probably feel differently. Would Tillman have been the type of guy to stand in front of the unjustly accused with a gun and kill anyone who tried to hang them?

This prompted me to re-read my take on the Tillman book and it just led to more questions about my (our) place in this world. How do I guarantee an appropriate response in times of crisis and conflict, especially when faced with crushing peer pressure? When do you step in and when do you walk away? When do you act on what you really feel? When is it right to decide to take a human life?

Tough questions.

This issue was foreshadowed very early in the book but I wasn’t able to connect it until I reviewed things. As the posse was developing Davies tried to nip things in the bud by first reasoning with the group. He even seemed to think one person standing up to them in a non-violent manner would keep them from going. Croft didn’t think so and noted this:

I wasn’t so sure of that. Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared. If rarity is worth, then moral courage is a lot higher quality than physical courage; but, excepting diamonds and hard cash, there aren’t many who take to anything because of its rarity. Just the other way. Davies was resisting something that had immediacy and a strong animal grip, with something remote and mistrusted. He’d have to make his argument look common sense and hardy, or else humorous, and I wasn’t sure he could do either. If he couldn’t he was going to find it was the small but present “we,” not the big, misty “we,” that shaped men’s deeds, no matter what shaped their explanations. (pg 62)

So maybe my description of Croft as “ill-equipped” earlier was wrong and maybe Davies was even less-equipped to stop this charade of justice. Maybe only someone who could apply the “big, misty” morality to the here-and-now in the face of physical opposition could stop this thing. If Croft had this insight, why didn’t he take the action? Or, maybe worse, why didn’t he feel the same guilt that Davies felt? Is Davies just irrational and too hard on himself?

Food for thought.

This book is especially appealing to fans of the Western. It has many of the stereotypical western characters but does not have many of the stereotypical western scenes. There was no big shootout at a pre-arranged place and no hero swooping in to save the day with guns blazing. But there was a big woman called Ma who can fight like a man and a Civil war vet who still doesn’t think the war is over.

I’ve thought about this book a lot over the last 48 hours. I need to make a point to come back to it in a few weeks.

Categories
food

Owen & Engine

Owen and Engine As Served - cropped and lightened

Every so often I get hungry for a burger. I’m not talking every day. C’mon, maybe four or five times a week I’ll think, yeah, a burger would taste good. It’s not like I have a problem or anything. Most of the time I don’t act on these urges; I push them down into that dark, dirty place with other urges like ones to punch the loud talker on the bus or to watch ten straight hours of the NBA Playoffs.

I cracked on Sunday and went to Owen & Engine for the first time with burger meat on my mind. I showed up at around 1pm and the place was pretty full. There are maybe ten seats at the bar and I was able to get two for a friend and myself (friend and I, friend and me, what’s correct?). The place is smaller than I thought, unless they have an upstairs or something. A steady crowd of neighborhood types and movie-goers kept the staff hopping (it’s right across the street from the Regal City North 14).

I asked the bartender about the burger and he says, “It’s amazing. It’s 40% ground beef, 30% short rib, and 30% brisket and done to temperature so if you usually order it medium-rare I’d go with medium. It’s hand packed and our kitchen really knows how to cook a burger perfectly. You’ll love it.”

Okay man, I thought, I would have been okay with, “It’s good.” I certainly appreciate the passion though.

So there it is up top – burger, medium, no cheese, $14. The grilled onions came with it, I didn’t ask for them but they were a nice touch. No lettuce or tomato, but you get a pickle spear. It comes on a potato bap, which is Scottish for bun. The chips (yes, fries) are nice and come with a distinctive malt vinegar garlic aioli, which was darn good, but we aren’t going to go into that.

Let’s talk burger. Tossing short rib and brisket into the mix makes for a darker, juicier, and less dense patty when compared to standard ground beef/ground chuck/ground sirloin patty. Here’s the cross section:

Owen and Engine burger cross section

It looks like a massive half pounder but doesn’t eat that way. It’s almost light and crumbly, dare I say, and melts in your mouth. It’s so juicy that you get a little premature bun saturation, which I don’t mind. It led me to ask the bartender whether it was grilled or fried. His answer was, “Grilled.”

I pressed on for some clarification because I was surprised, there was no char flavor and it was so juicy. I asked again, “So it was grilled on a big sheet of steel?”

“Yes,” was his answer.

Okay, got it now. I call that fried. This distinction between grilled and fried isn’t something that makes sense to everyone, so I’m not faulting this bartender. Be sure, this would have been a different experience had it been set on a grill where the juices dripped into a flame and were reconstituted into the meat via flame vapor/smoke/stuff. I don’t prefer one over the other, heck, I don’t even consider grilled burgers and fried burgers in the same food group. It’s kind of like pizza; thin crust, stuffed, and regular pizza are three distinct groups worthy of singular consideration.

I got a little off topic there, sorry. You need to know that I loved this burger, this place, the sides, and the atmosphere. It’s really enjoyable. I can tell because when I left I was pumped up. I was sending pictures to G and telling her all about the malt vinegar aioli and the brisket/short rib combo. Oh yeah, I didn’t even mention the great IPA from Dark Horse Brewing. I can’t blow any holes in this place at all.

I can see taking people I care about here.

Categories
screen

Bleak House

This Downton Abbey thing has wet my appetite for more Brit lit classic drama stuff, so Gail and I did Bleak House together. It’s different from Downton Abbey though, it isn’t some soap opera dramatized for modern tastes. It’s a dark, scathing indictment of the British legal system based on the book written by Charles Dickens. He’s famous.

Let me be clear, if you’re in the mood for this type of Brit lit tragedy, comedy, romance, drama kind of thing, you need to head straight for this BBC version of Bleak House, now. Period. Bypass Jane Austen, bypass Merchant & Ivory, bypass Downton Abbey; nobody involved with those is worthy of carrying Charles Dickens’ undergarments. In fact, I couldn’t think of a better way to blow your two-week free trial of Netflix than taking in the seven hours or so of Bleak House.

Esther Summerson is a fictional character to hang your hat on. And Gillian Anderson knocks it out of the friggin’ park in the role of Lady Dedlock. It’s also one of Carey Mulligan’s first roles and she nails Ada Clare. I want to consume more Charles Dickens stuff soon. I’m thinking Great Expectations next.

Twice this month I’ve been half way through something and said to myself, “Man, do I really have to keep going?” Wow, what a payoff in both cases (this and A Storm of Swords). Mark my words, I will never, ever, stop a work of fiction at the half way point. Ever. I’ll either stop it at 25% or 75%, never 50%. Hold me to that.

I’m not as familiar with Dickens as I should be. I read Oliver Twist in the 90s but can’t recall it all that well. I remember The Artful Dodger a little but that’s about it. I was a different person then and maybe a little brain dead or something. I just don’t think I’ll forget the characters from Bleak House. I’ve mentioned a few but there are so many; Snagsby, Krook, Tulkinghorn, Guppy, Smallweed, Skimpole, Bucket, … amazing crew.

I was a little put off at first by the camera work. It’s dark and scenes open with loud, sharp noises and distant camera angles, often multiple noise/angle scene openings. I got used to it though. Such a great miniseries. It’s complicated and you’re in the dark for a big chunks of it, but clarity comes in time and the ending is heart wrenching and victorious. Despite the Netflix/Apple TV problems we’ve been having (cutting out in the middle of shows, not available), it’s been paying for itself so far.

Categories
books

A Storm of Swords

This is book three of the series. I started reading it after seeing the advertisements for the start of Season Two on HBO. They are pushing this thing pretty hard in print and on TV. I don’t have HBO so I’ve only seen an episode or so on the road and it looks pretty true to the books. Not that you care, but remember, I only started reading this because I caught an episode while traveling.

So here we are.

I was bored with this book at the half way point. It just wasn’t doing anything for me. But shortly after the half it took off like a shot and never looked back. There was a frenzy of death, bloodshed, hope, sorrow, victory, and disappointment over the course of a few chapters that caused a bout of late-night reading.

The story is complicated and there are plenty of deep characters, yet it can still be treated as a guilty pleasure. It goes both ways, sci-fi and fantasy addicts can discuss the story’s social significance and people like me can bang through it because it’s a ton of fun. I forget many of the characters and I don’t have any idea where they are geographically (in a relative sense, it’s a fictional land), but I can still follow it.

I’ve heard some say this book, number three, is the best in the series. I’ll leave that to the pundits, but I will say, the ending left me in a place that makes me think I’ll read the next book soon. These things are a thousand pages a pop so they’re not small endeavors, but that second half went quickly and left me hanging. I’ll target October for the next one.

I’m worried that my trilogy rule, which says things get shaky after number three, will hold true. The Dune “trilogy” rocked until the fourth book. I tried to stay with it, but couldn’t. W.E.B. Griffin’s Presidential Agent series made it to a solid fourth book but blew up on the fifth. I’m done with that, despite the fact that I said I’d give it a chance. I won’t.

Now this Song of Ice and Fire series (TV calls it Game of Thrones series) is already five books and Martin is shooting to make it seven. That’s big. Hopefully it ends up more like the American crime or British spy series I read which seemingly extend forever without losing momentum. Martin published the first one back in 1996 and there have been five and six years between the last two books, so I have time to read the next two before the anticipatory wait period.

Yeah, the anticipatory wait period, that’s fun stuff. It’s that time of analysis, punditry, speculation, and reflection that occurs during the run-up to potential new stuff in a series of successes. I may or may not be able to enjoy it, depending on how fast I consume the next two.