This week I took somewhat of a break from the original book I was reading (although I still shred through 50 pages or so) and switched it up a little bit. My brother has been nagging me about reading "Game of Thrones" for some time now, so I decided I would pick it up. The plot of the novel seems to be pretty vast and large in scope, but the problem is that reading it takes so much attention and it feels like work just to read a single page. The pages in my brother's giant God-sized edition book were 14 inch walls of size ten font that were very, very discouraging for a novice novel reader like myself. I also noticed how much of a big switch up it was from "Choke" which is much more relaxing to read because of its short concise chapter, common vocabulary, and familiarity to reality. "Game of Thrones" is a medieval-ish era story with far, far more characters than I'm used to keeping track of in a story. However, the story is fairly interesting. It's got a little bit of everything you'd expect from your average medieval fantasy story; people descended from dragons, expectations of chivalrous conduct, fantasy creatures, mystery surrounding the outside world, and the fan favorite... incest. For some reason these medieval stories seem to always have that incest aspect. I don't know why this recurring theme, I assume there's got to be a significant amount of research regarding their target audience how a significant portion of their readers have some sort of repressed oedipal complex. While reading, I could not help but feel like this story was the love child of "The Lord of The Rings" and "The Village." In fact "The Village" is an extremely similar plot except for the whole M. Night Shyamalan-ing at the end that makes the audience completely love or hate what they just watched.
From what I have continued to read in "Choke", I am really liking it. This is certainly one of my favorite books of all time. The way the author tells the story just makes the already awesome plot even more awesome. It is making me strongly consider stopping my excessive video game playing just so I can tear through all of Chuck Palahniuk's bibliography. This story is just getting more and more epic, the main character goes through his life being such a legendary anti-hero. While getting into shenanigans that make him seem like a simple minded college prankster, he is conflicted with deep emotional struggles and uses nearly everything as a metaphor for something else. For example, he has a deep conflict with strong women and he has felt like his mom's hostage for his whole life. Now he concocts a plan to finally become the hero he always wanted to save him. Since his mother is on the verge of dying, he does not want to make her completely better, so he keeps her near death so he can be her "savior" everyday. Also, when he goes to a strip club he says one of my favorite quotes of all time. Referring to the way the strippers look under the black lights, red lights, and the fact that she's on a stage he says "It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself." This quote instantly reached legendary status for me because of how awesomely true it is in the literal sense, and the fact that it is shown through other mediums every day.
To rap up, the book "Choke" has left me with a strange feeling. It's caused me to become all riled up about reading. I feel kind of dumb because I have been treating reading as the entertainment leper since middle school, but now I'm more psyched about reading more novels than I am about seeing new movies or playing new games.
