GRRM GRIND

I'll just post the pictures, they don't need any words to upset you as they did to me. Dear Lord.

While not short with the greens coming in with shiploads of book sales/royalties and other writing fees, among other moneymaking thingamajigs, George, rather his publishers, came and went to republish the literary egg that in time would hatch the biggest fantasy empire since Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 

The Ice Dragon is dressed as a children's book (err juvenile fiction, as if it changes anything), while hiding inside the typical gritty desolation hand-in-hand with imaginative graphic present in ASOIAF. Already quite unlikely to its aspect genre, the book just got more edgier than that of the 2007 re-drawing. We have on our hand is a Salvatorean-Warcrafty mix that could easily have been bred by Peter Jackson and HBO.

It's awesome, really. Even the unused illustrations are breathtaking. But if you've read it before, then most probably you're having mixed feelings, and not for the better.

Amping up the grit and losing all the fairy tale flavor that it exudes. I don't know if I should feel sad or happy, but if history runs true, then I'd be both. You want to retain the original, yet you want that badass frexing dragon right there.

Well, it doesn't matter if they change the art or whatever, I'll still go back to the warm, homey comfort in Yvonne's drawings.

Let's go to Martin's procrastinating now. For sure we won't get the whole Westeros and the Know World's fill from ASIOAF, even with the Game of Thrones tv series and short stories combined. And Martin came up with a solution in the academic glory of The World of Ice and Fire.

It is a compendium of facts and entries on the previously only mentioned, better yet implied, historical and geographical mysteries in the canon. A sample entry can be seen on Martin's official website that downright destroyed the whole AC/BC dating system we have been using hitherto. Oh, the wiki's sure to rave.

These are just some for you to add to that growing GRRM altar you have at home. Well until you see these.

A seven times godsdamned pop-up book. It unfolds to a fucken' paper construct map-spread of Westeros and some of Essos, well minus the unseen parts in the tv series. So dumbed down to the people who thinks Dany's name is Khaleesi, sumptuous wife to the horsedude, it's called Game of Thrones: A Pop-up Guide to Westeros.

Speaking of maps. We also have The Lands of Ice and Fire, ten maps of the known world, even showing areas in Essos, Sothoryos and Ulthos that are still unmentioned in the books.

Also. George won't write a GoT episode on the upcoming Season 5. Sources say that he chose not to in order to focus on finishing the last books of this century's epic.

Oh please, oh please...

I'm actually kinda "prohibited" from posting in any of my blogs, probably coz of some work backlogs that mysteriously stacked up. I had no idea. But I'll tell you a better idea, THE 35th MANILA INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIR! YEAAAAAAAAAAH!!!

RANT STARTS HERE

Also known as MIBF, it's one of the biggest and most popular in the handful of book fairs in the country, I know, so sad. Anyway, it's technically the first (and quite depressingly so, also the last) book fair I've been to, that being at age four. My parents did not buy me books, even though I specifically pointed at some Harry Potters at the time. Ended up going home with a huge dinosaur jigsaw puzzle and some rubber dinosaur figures. Not that bad, quite a fair trade really, but imagine if I've started reading back then. Things would've been different, well up to a degree maybe.

I would've been weirder, more secluded, and much and much more condescending than I am perfectly quite able to right now. Probably have a substantially greater amount of books that's obvious. Don't know I just feel like I've started late on reading or some of my other interests than what is considered necessary or normal. I became a bibliophile at 12, but reading other media like encyclopedias and stuff came earlier at three or four.

No, I didn't read alone at three, I got my parents or siblings read me the words and letters. Four however, I already started with school, so I was quite able to read some of the simpler parts, though indefinitely still can't pronounce Archaeopteryx at the time. In short, I just think it was a missed opportunity, but I don't blame anybody, not me nor my parents.

And this is one of the things I love musing, if it didn't happen then, it sure is horrendously straining my bookshelves now. I guess things just work their way around no matter how you try to stop or suppress them.

RANT ENDS

Among other things, MIBF is one of the greater points in my Subsidiary Bucket List (I have plenty of lists). Being quite far from the metro and being too lazy to go there and more than always being broke, things came topping one after the other, just like my articles. Hehehe.