How do I love thee, let me count the ways

Slogging through over 5000 pages of verbosity reading George RR Martin's Fire and Ice series was a hideous, painful and often surreal exercise in patience and perseverance. I read the reviews of this series on Amazon and the book jackets and frankly I expected more. "The American Tolkien" my ass.

How did I not love thee?
1) Includes a cast of characters that is Tolstoyan in scope, but not in depth of development. How did they make an HBO series out of this? They have to be employing every single extra in LA.
2) Everyone and I mean everyone dies in this series. Out of 350 "main characters" only two remain standing at the end of book four.
3) The level of pain, mutilation and suffering inflicted on every character in this series with no apparent redemption is hard to fit into my world view.
4) All I could think about while reading this series was the striking similarity of the political climate in the Seven Kingdoms and the current Republican Party in America.
5) One of the main characters to survive (although brutally mutilated) is a dwarf named Newt Gingrich. Suffice to say, I was not rooting for him.

If you loved this series, forgive me for trashing it. I'm sure there is hidden value in it somewhere.
Anne McCaffery, what do they have on you to make you write such a nice blurb?

Lisa / Mom / Daughter

OK, I'm in, with three provisos: 1) I refuse to read any book that was made into a movie starring Arnold Schwartzenegger. 2) I reserve the privilege of adding titles, especially from Russian and Czech science fiction; I am shocked at the absence of the Russian Evgenii Zamiatin's We, one of the great books of 20th-century literature, not to mention science fiction; nor did the voters consider Karel Capek's R.U.R. and War with the Newts, great books from a visionary Czech writer.  Both are on a par with Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury; neither write trilogies of 1000s of pages, like J. R. R. Tolkien, when 300 would have served just as well. 3) I will explore science fiction from China and India, in hopes of discovering some insight into the emergence of two great countries.  If Lisa and Theo can live with these provisos -- and what are they going to do? trash talk? -- then I'm in.  I've just begun Mary Woolstonecraft's Frankenstein on my new Kindle.

Joe/Dad/Grandad

In the beginning, there was SciFi

Our project began in the fall of 2011, when NPR announced their list of the top 100 SF and Fantasy books of all time. Immediately my OCD and overt competitiveness was activated. Theo, Charlie and I started talking about it. How many of these books had we read? Where our favorites listed? How would it be to try to read all of these great books in a year? Would we have time to do anything else (eat, sleep, work, school)? Being completely crazy, we decided to embark on reading as many of the top 100 as soon as possible and use it as Theo's high school senior project. Charlie elected to join us because his job in a used book store in Durango ideally positioned him to obtain our books and also because his OCD ranks up there with mine.
Here's a link to the list for those of you inclined to join us:
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-booksonced

Within a day or two I spotted the fatal flaw in our plan. This list was the "top 100" SF & fantasy books, but a majority of them are trilogies, quadrologies or worse, bringing the actual total of books needing to be read to approximately 300. Never one to be put off by overwhelming odds we embarked on the project anyway. My rules for myself (I can't speak for Charlie or Theo) are pretty straightforward: If I can't remember the plot and the characters verbatim, I have to reread the book (or books). I am not allowing myself to read any other genre of fiction until I have completed this gargantuan task. That's pretty much it.

In the next few days, I will start to write about the books I have read in the last few months. The good, the bad and the extremely annoying (George RR Martin, beware).

Dad, Theo and Chas, I invite you to write your SciFi reading experiences as well.

Mom (Lisa)