++It seems the entire continent of Westeros has purchased a copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest entry in the groundbreaking A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Dance With Dragons, which was notoriously long-in-the-making, sold 298,000 copies on its first day, including print, e-books, and audiobooks. Reviews have been pretty much uniformly glowing, which just goes to show that good things do come to those who wait…and wait, and wait, and wait.
++Bill Keller’s latest missive from his Glenda the Good Witch-style cultural bubble at the New York Times is about how annoying it is to have so many friends and colleagues who write books. Preach it, Bill!
++The Guardian put together this gallery demonstrating the disheveled appeal of battered books.
Back in 2005, George R.R. Martin released A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (the basis for HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones). Despite its almost-800-page length, Crows was only half a novel, really. The author admitted that the sheer size of his ambitious narrative had forced him to split one planned book in two. What’s more, many of his most beloved characters were absent from Crows.
