There is a trend in the fantasy genre that I kind of wish never took root: the multi-book series. Every author seems intent on publishing ten-thousand page epics, each one longer than the last, with no end in sight. The most egregious of these seems to be The Wheel of Time, by the late Robert Jordan. The twelfth book in the series just came out in October of last year, nearly twenty years since the first book came out, and there are still two books to go. And despite the fact that since the sixth book, I’ve felt that I’ve just been strung along on a wild goose chase, I still plodded through the monstrous volumes, still wanting to at last reach the end of that gargantuan tale.

But the series that has ensorcelled me as of late is A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. Because my brother got me a Sony e-book reader for Christmas, I’ve been itching to find something to read on it. Apparently my tastes in literature border on the obscure, and I’ve had a really rough time finding something actually available in some e-book format. So I decided I try something that was more popular.

I downloaded A Game of Thrones a little more than a week ago, and have been barreling through the books at an absurd pace, having just finished the third book A Storm of Swords earlier this evening. I’ll probably end up downloading the fourth book later tonight, and hopefully it’ll take me at least a few days to read through it, but after that, I’ll be stuck in the same limbo that all George R. R. Martin’s fans have been stuck in for the past four years. Yet another tale whose ending I want to reach. Hopefully, Mr. Martin stays in good health for a long time, and that he really stops at seven books.

Being Ash Wednesday, I found it fitting that I finally discovered the meaning of valar morghulis, a phrase repeated by one of the main characters of the book, and demonstrated multiple times, sometimes quite disturbingly, throughout the series. “All men must die.” From dust you came, to dust you shall return.

I think some people blame this phenomenon of endless verbosity on J.R.R. Tolkien, who is frequently cited as the father of modern fantasy. For the longest time, I found it difficult to find a book that didn’t have the feel of a Tolkien clone. The shortest series are at least trilogies. (Never mind that The Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a trilogy at all—you can either look at it as a single book that ended up getting sliced into pieces by skittish publishers, or, if you look at the table of contents closely, as a series of six books, with two books in each volume.) But the entire text of The Lord of the Rings is probably shorter than a single volume of most of these series, and my favorite fantasy novels are all shorter than even LotR (I guess it’s a toss-up between The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K Le Guin. Sure, The Earthsea Cycle consists of five novels, but none of them are longer than 300 pages. Neither of these tales resemble LotR very much—there’s no Dark Lord to defeat, no talisman of incredible power to destroy—but I think they do manage to capture the feel of Faerie well.) One of these days, I’d love to read a good, short standalone fantasy novel.

I also don’t know what it is that draws me to these epic sagas that read almost like history books, detailing the goings and comings of kings, queens, lords, ladies, and knights. While there’s plenty of uncanniness and lots of undead creatures and even some dragons in GRRM’s books, he doesn’t seem to be shooting for the same level of Faerie that the books I love the most have. I’ve seen a few reviewers note that he seems to be going for a “low magic” setting. (The other extreme is where everyone has god-like powers, like in The Wheel of Time and the Harry Potter series.) Given all the court intrigues, internecine treacheries, and dilemmas of succession that the books describe, what it actually reminds me the most of is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a book written 700 years ago, originally in Chinese. The only reason I ever heard of it was because of the 8-bit Nintendo strategy game of the same name that I once played almost continuously for an entire week of vacation when I was a freshman in high school, stopping only to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. It’s set at the end of the collapse of the Han Dynasty. The Glendale Public Library apparently has (or at least had) a copy of the novel. I barely remember it, to be honest, although even then, I thought that the translation was a little clunky and inartful, but nevertheless, I slogged through it to the end. But even that book is dwarfed by the average contemporary fantasy volume.

After I finish A Feast for Crows I’m not sure what I’ll be reading next. I may have to go back to dead tree format after all.