rushthatspeaks | Oct. 2nd, 2014

The thing with being ill for a long time-- and I had the flu for basically the entirety of September and am not completely recovered-- is that as you regain energy you start to want to do something difficult, just because it is so long since you've had the capacity to do anything difficult. Consequently, I find myself very seriously mulling over the idea of reading A Song of Ice and Fire.

Now, for many people this would be a substantial time investment, but not difficult, as such. Just long. But the last time I read anything significant by Martin, Dying of the Light, two hundred and fifty-four pages took me just under seven hours and left me with a splitting and lingering headache. It was entirely worth it, or I wouldn't be considering doing anything of the kind again, but it was one of the more difficult books I read that year. A Song of Ice and Fire is very famous and has gotten to the point where I feel culturally behind in not knowing anything at all about it (except that the TV show sounds as though it has more visual depictions of sexual violence than I am really down with watching), but the main reason I am interested in trying to read it is that I have been thinking on and off for years about why Martin is so difficult for me, and I think I've finally gotten it and can maybe therefore fix it.

It's not, as I initially thought, that Martin thinks perpendicularly to the way I think and that therefore I don't understand why anybody in his work does the things they do. That, as I've known for years, is C.J. Cherryh, whose humans make less sense to me than her aliens, and Martin and Cherryh really aren't all that alike. I have problems parsing sentences in Martin which are simple landscape descriptions and have nothing to do with characters at all.

It is, I think, and this is why I'm writing this up, literally to do with the way in which I sensorily relate to texts. To expand: there are visual readers out there, who picture the events of a text the way that they would watch a film, and there are varying degrees of that; there are auditory readers, for lack of a better term, for whom the cadence and sound of the words encodes something about the way they relate to the story, and there are varying degrees of that. There are probably many other sorts of reader, and if you are one of them I would love to hear about it.

But I, as I have mentioned before, am a kinesthetic and structural reader. I interact most easily with a text when there are lots of touch-words and words which define the extent of spaces and smell-words to give me an internal idea of the book as a chain of connected locations in which characters relate to each other. And also, independently of that, I have a mental image of the structure of the book as an overall thing; I picture it internally as rather like a free-form glass sculpture, swooping in here, curving out there, changing color there; this structure incorporates the plot and the characters and the relationship of the plot to the characters and the themes and the pacing and how well the book holds together as a thing in itself, as well as several other things (and I am not consciously sure what some of them are).

( Thoughts on reading styles involving Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip, and a rather long digression about M. John Harrison before concluding back at Martin. )