Here Be Dragons « Garden Street Designs

category: etsy

Here Be Dragons 0

I have some excuses for the extended blogging absence. I was doing other stuff; I am easily distracted and a champion procrastinator; sometimes blogging feels too much like working; etc. And I had an existential crisis over the entire enterprise of maintaining this attempt at an authentic persona in what increasingly seems to me a thoroughly inauthentic medium. But really, I was just busy reading.

Having watched HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ in June, I had to get some answers after that final episode of Season 1. And being a bookseller I was well aware that there were already 4 books in the series, with a fifth due in July, so I bought them all and proceeded to plough through them. Turns out I learned two things about myself: I am a slow plougher, and also a fan of alternate reality historical fiction otherwise known as Fantasy.

When I worked in a bookstore (as opposed to my current book biz gig that has me working from home), I would claim that I’m so not a fantasy person. And yet. I’ve read Tolkien. And ‘The Mists of Avalon’ (I was once a teenaged girl, after all). And just about all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s stuff. In fact I have an enduring, if cheesily sentimental, leftover teenage obsessive-fondness for his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, the one with a dragon and a wizard and a red priestess and a white tree, the one that includes a rehashing of that old Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot chestnut. Oh no, fantasy is so not my bag.

You know what my problem with the genre was? Its fans. Fantasy (and sci-fi) fans are a specific thorn in the side of any bookseller responsible for merchandising those sections. In the huge bookstore I worked in once upon a time, if a week went by without a complaint that we had shelved The Wheel of Time series with one book out of sequential order, well that would have been a gloriously irritation-free week. (I never had one.) They were always equal parts accusatory and condescending, as if it made me happy to cause them grief with my evil shelving skills, and wasn’t I a complete idiot for not knowing the crucial difference between The Riftwar Saga and The Riftwar Legacy and the Legends of Riftwar. Same author, same diff, was my own point of view.

(To be fair, customers who religiously frequented the ‘New Age’, ‘Business’ and ‘Self-Help’ sections were the ones who truly made me want to hightail it to the break room. My favourite customers? The ones who came up to the cash desk with a book from the ‘Erotica’ section hidden tidily under some blockbuster from one of those novel-factories like Grisham or Crichton, as though Grisham/Crichton novels are so powerfully anti-erotic they neutralize all possibility of any wink-wink nudge-nudge embarrassment or discomfort over the purchasing of smut. But listen: honestly, if you buy books, well, bless you. Whatever you buy, even if it’s a piece of crap and a sorry waste of a good tree, just bless you for keeping books around and authors writing, and for keeping the dying breed known as The Bookseller gainfully employed.)

But what I want to say to fantasy readers everywhere is this: I get you now. You are my people. I understand the lack-of-sleep eye twitches and the half-pajama attire as you arrive two minutes before store closing to purchase the next installment in a series because you can’t go to bed until you get some answers. I understand your need to discuss all those various convoluted plot twists and your meticulous theories on the finer points of the more obscure prophecies within a story, even if it’s with a clearly disinterested if not outright alarmed bookseller who really doesn’t know what the hell you’re going on about. I get it. I am one of you. I’m sorry for the past judging.

A Song of Ice and Fire is purely great storytelling, with lots of themes and symbolism you’ll recognize if you’re a history and/or religious studies nerd. And there are some great characters (and yes, dragons). Even the characters I was irritated by (I’m looking at you, khaleesi) were never completely boring. (But wow, the further along we go on Daenerys’ journey, the greater my hindsight sympathy for Viserys.) The true joy came when characters I thought I had pegged as one thing turned out to be quite another. I like nuanced, honest depictions of what humans are really like. None of this pure heroism or pure evil business. But fair warning to anyone considering reading this series: George RR Martin can be a cruel bitch of a writer. You can’t be faint of heart or twee and precious or you won’t survive him. You who already know what I mean, really know what I mean.

For a lark I searched “Game of Thrones” and ‘winter is coming’ on Etsy, to see what crafty fellow fans have created out of their own obsession with the series:

‘Fear cuts deeper than swords’ one of Arya’s mottos in bracelet form by SpiffingJewelry

SKULLbunz: Ah, Viserys, I think you got the shaft. Sure, you have rage and entitlement issues, and you’re equal parts bitchy and creepy with your little sister, but who can blame you, really?