A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin

I held out for years on the HBO series, not for any philosophical or ideological reason, and only have recently watched them - if you have seen the series, like it, and have not read the books, you should - there is an enormous amount of wonderful stuff missing from the show (understandably) - and, frankly, I don't know how you can watch the show having not read the books - way too confusing. I thought that if the series is that good, the book(s) are probably worth some time. And they are. Caveat - you have to be patient. The novels run some 800 to over 1000 pages apiece; the first 600 pages of the first volume (Game of Thrones) deal mainly with character development and the history of the land, Westeros - a necessity for the complexity of the story to come. Don't have much to say about the text itself - it's reasonably well written and paced (I guess) appropriately - though some will drown I suppose with the plodding course through the first half of Game of Thrones (the pace is veritably brisk when compared with Robert Jordan's novels - aagh, I gave up after four of those). The plot certainly picks up steam with the second installment, A Clash of Kings, and then roars through the third, A Storm of Swords, before settling down a bit in A Feast For Crows - nevertheless, the storyline continues to evolve with new characters appearing. The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, is more of the same and makes me wonder if the story will ever resolve. I am a bit fatigued, but if you are interested in fantasy/adventure, these are worth your time.

Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

You'd think I spent the summer lounging without a book; two months and counting since my last comment. I'm muscling my way through at least three books, one of which I managed to finish last evening. Embarrassingly, despite my affection for SciFi, I had read very little Asimov. I may have read one of his robot books a long time ago but cannot remember for certain and cannot pick it out from a list of the hundreds of books he wrote. I like this book for it's philosophical bent and its landscape is littered with cool little futuristic gadgets. The thrust of the story is the idea that the past, with appropriate statistical modeling, can be used to predict the future - when presented at a conference of mathematicians it sets off a cat and mouse chase. Crisp dialogue and some really thoughtful ideas on what it might mean to be able to predict the future make it appealing. Asimov also tackles the arc of history - humans had been settling the galaxy for over 12,000 years when the story takes place. One idea is that even though technology is excellent at recording history, the repeated reading and writing of the information to the media is still flawed and, over the millennia, old records are lost. I don't know how well that holds up to reality but it does call to mind DNA replication - despite its accuracy, the DNA polymerase still makes mistakes and the repair mechanisms are not perfect - introducing mutations and subsequent loss of fidelity. Repeat thousands of times and the product looks markedly different. I think I'll read Foundation next.