Category Archives: bookish

Well, now that Game of Thrones is all over for the next 9 or 10 months, you may be thinking that life is dull and without meaning. Fear not, at least for book readers! The new book A Dance with Dragons comes out July 12.

Game of Thrones TV show fans who haven’t read the series really should use this time to read the books. There is so much back history to the world that George R R Martin has created, you really are missing out on some most-excellent story-telling. And you are certainly free from the looong wait times that have plagued this series. Not that we’re completely free of such misfortune in the future. Hopefully not six years, though – right? RIGHT?

Current A Song of Ice and Fire readers may want to freshen their knowledge, so I have compiled some links to articles recapping what’s happened in Westeros and Essos. So why not go all in and read from the very beginning, the Dawn of Days? The Wertzone blog has done such a thing, and Adam Whitehead has put together a pretty concise timeline of events in GRRM’s world.

Part One: Ancient History documents from the Dawn of Days starting twelve thousand years before the current storyline of ASoIaF up to the formation of the Seven Kingdoms (there were actually 8 at that time). This includes the presence of the Children of the Forest, the events of The Long Night and subsequent War for the Dawn, the Andal Invasion, the Flight of the Rhoynar and the rise and fall of Valyria.

If you haven’t heard this one, get ready to abandon the internets for a while, or at least until you’ve read your copy of A Dance with Dragons!

Amazon Germany, due to a glitch of some sort, released about 180 copies of A Dance with Dragons (people in the know just call it Dance) early. This is pretty upsetting to the publishers to be certain, but the ramifications are not lost on fans who are being spoiled by douchebags blabbing all over forums and social influencers. Some spoilers are also false, much to the trolls’ delight and forum moderators’ dismay – they’re the ones who have to slog through all the muck and tidy things up for us.

Other merchandisers have also released the book ahead of time, so the number is likely to grow, and the effects of this “leak” may snowball. No one is safe, pandemonium has been unleashed, so it’s highly advisable to unplug your internets.

Unkilled by the Heathen blog, spoiler-free since June 27th, 2011.