Yes, I'm double dipping. Here's the picture from the poster
So, having seen that, no-one will be surprised to hear that this one was A Game of Thrones, the first book in G R R Martin's (as yet and probably always to be) unfinished fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.
I was in this party a long time. Not quite from the beginning as my copies of Game of Thrones and Clash of Kings (which was number two) were both paperbacks, but by the the time of number three A Storm of Swords I was waiting with cash in hand to get my sticky mitts on it in hardback as soon as I could. Storm of Swords was perhaps the best of them, after that the quality of the writing and the stories dropped like a stone. I bought the next two, although it was a long wait, five years for number four, and another six for number five. So number five came out in 2011 and number seven has been promised as being almost imminent ever since. So that's another ten years and no sign of it .... I no longer care. Number five was so dreadful that I swore the man would never get another penny of my money and if the final volumes were published tomorrow I doubt I would bestir myself to borrow them from the library. I just don't care any more, but there again some people came along and did a TV series that gave us the end of the story so I don't need thousands of pages of violently pornographic, dull and repetitive prose to discover what happened to my favourite, and in fact not so favourite, characters.
In a way re-reading this after so long was a bit of a sad experience. Before he got carried away by his own publicity and grew a head so big he presumably walks through doorways sideways Martin could write and he was telling a good story with strong characters and storylines. He didn't shy away from having the good guys come last, now and then, although his claim to be subverting every fantasy trope there ever was came adrift when it turned out, after many trials and tribulations that the overlooked bastard son was in fact the long lost and rightful King. How many times have we seen that one?
On a related but lighter note, I saw with some amusement over the past few years that all the shops in Edinburgh which carried A Game of Thrones merchandise, and there were a lot of them, all majored on items bearing the Stark branding. Wolves, long memories and a wish for self rule - I wonder why that spoke more loudly there than the other Houses of Westeros?
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