A Song of Ice and Fire
I was pregnant when I started watching Game of Thrones, the show that had half the world obsessed. But I couldn’t handle all that graphic violence with a baby in my belly. So instead, I picked up the first book at the Central State Library of Guanajuato, Wigberto Jiménez Moreno. The series is called A Song of Ice and Fire.
Then my maternity leave began. And since I never got a library card, I downloaded the book as a PDF (poor me!).
For the rest of my leave, I watched every single Adam Sandler movie. From his early roles as a side character (like the ridiculously stupid Airheads, with that ugly Brendan Fraser guy) to the mind-numbingly boring The Cobbler. Heck, I even rewatched Jack and Jill… No wonder my poor laptop chose a quick death. One day, it just refused to turn on. Poof.
I downloaded the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire.
After finishing it, I tried reading a bunch of other books. But I abandoned them all halfway: Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami, A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (and I even suffered through I Am Charlotte Simmons again just because I was too lazy to find another book)…
So after The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing and Brothers by Yu Hua (a masterpiece you just can’t put down) and Don Quixote… I couldn’t read anything that wasn’t A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones.
When my laptop died (thanks, Adam Sandler), I started using the forgotten tablet my husband gave me like ten Christmases ago. Honestly, it’s the only reason I survived months without a computer!
So I kept reading and downloading the remaining four books in the series:
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A Clash of Kings,
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A Storm of Swords,
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A Feast for Crows, and
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A Dance with Dragons.
Of course, not all of them are equally gripping.
Once they start introducing new characters like the Krakens or those sand snakes, you lose interest because you can’t keep track of who’s who —and really, you only care about two or three people (I love the Lannisters, such a karmic soulmate fairy tale). At first, you adore the Khaleesi, but after five books, she turns into Dumbteesi, and all you want is to smack some sense into her thick skull.
I had no idea what to read next that I wouldn’t abandon halfway: The Lord of the Rings wasn’t available in my tiny home library, The Hobbit was… BUT I got used to reading comfortably on my tablet, which I later replaced with an Amazon Kindle —no more hauling around three kilos of bound paper.
