It's been a while since I've written, and I am ashamed about that. I've been lucky enough to be working in reference in a public library for the past six months, and I do have a lot to say about that. One of the greatest things about this job though is that it has given me a great excuse to read books constantly. I pull books off the shelf as compulsively as a klepto in a K-Mart because I CAN and they're freaking FREE. Aren't libraries awesome? Going there regularly has seriously improved my quality of life, no joke.

All this reading has been seriously tempting my inner lit major, so much so that when I tried to write an email to a coworker today about a cool link I found relating to Game of Thrones, I wound up just writing an essay on the relationship of a reader/viewer/consumer to modern media. Not ready to come off as a total crazed lunatic, I had to admit to myself that what I had written was not an email but a blog post. So, as much as I would like to talk about libraries in my revival post, literature is on the brain so that's what's coming first. here we go. I'm assuming some familiarity of both the ASOIAF/GOT series and Arrested Development, though it will probably still make sense even if you're not familiar with either.




I made the mistake recently of discovering a subgenre on the internet that's basically people writing scholarly pieces on ASOIAF. They're insanely fascinating and insightful and since I was basically an English major I can't stop reading them. I found one post that blew my mind, where this guy who covers GOT for the Rolling Stone goes painstakingly through the last two novels and pieces them together chronologically, so now it's possible for a reader to get the whole story at once instead of half the story now, half later. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. 

Reading that post got me thinking about how modern storytellers encourage their audience to interact with the medium more deeply by embedding retrospective plot points in the text. Particularly relevant is the new season of Arrested Development, playing with the narrative in a very similar albeit truncated way to GOT. AD is the kind of show that seems to only improve the more and more you watch it, and I suspect the same will be true for ASOIAF (I'm working on the fifth book now, and I'll probably try and reread the series after I take a bit of a break). The stories are presented in each series in so convoluted a way that it's pretty much impossible to appreciate them fully the first time around. Each series also somehow enjoys a rabid audience and a pretty unsympathetic ensemble cast.

#litmajorsareforever