This Will be Your Favourite Thing, My Ass.

"Isn't Dante's Divine Comedy the best thing you've read ever?"

No. No. Not even fucking close. If there's a list of the hundred best books I've read, the Divine Comedy wouldn't even breach top 50. And that's being generous.

It's not a bad book, to be sure. It's an amazing thing to be able to take all the stuff from all around your life and create a hundred canto poem. I make up stuff and I have three novels lying stagnant in my external, gathering dust. No, it is an amazing book but the best? No.

The Lord of the Rings is a top contender. A song of ice and fire is another. The Taqwacores, while underrated, is one of my favourite books EVAH. The Silmarillion is a no brainer.

"Oh, if you feel that way, then you probably don't actually know the depth of it."

You damn fucking right I didn't. Believe me, I gave the book a chance. I had about seven tabs open at all time on my browser while I was reading it, each with a page concerning the different people Dante met. And I honestly couldn't give a shit. I don't give a fuck about Florence in the 14th century. Sure, if analysed, the philosophy is vibrant, bursting even, and I'm pretty sure some people have referred to it as Summa Theologica in poem form.

While it helped revolutionise the Italian language and so on, it's not exactly... Reader friendly. It's something that's very selective. Some people fall in love with it, some people hate it and some, like me, read the whole thing and don't actually assert any feeling towards it. Like every other book out there.

That's the whole problem. Half of the people who actually claim to love the Comedy are simply saying it because it's old. I am of course choosing to not include the posers as their presence will greatly water down the aforementioned group. It's just like the Canterbury Tales and of course, the Lord of the Rings and a hundred other books. People just say that they are great because it has a following and that it's old.

It sucks for me because when I see a person who seem so devout to a book, I'd want to ask him a lot of things. Get a clearer picture on the characters or the general setting and so on. It fucking sucks when the person suddenly pretends to have a more important affair at hand.

Why lie about it? It's something I can never understand. Why pretend to like a book? But then when I think about it, if I get the answer to that, I get the answer to life and all its mysteries as well.

*

I just saw this movie. Fucking hell. It's amazing.

I fucking love it when comedians shift their character to something more serious. Like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine. They give a much more memorable impact, it seems.

[Spoilers] I expected the ending to be something cliché, to be honest. The asteroid is destroyed in the atmosphere into tiny specks of dust and everybody lives happily ever after.  But it didn't and mankind actually got wiped out. It's awesome. Fucking awesome. I know that I shouldn't be this happy at the thought of every living thing dying in a sea of flame but god damn it, I am. It's exactly the ending that the movie deserves. Fucking 10/10. Will watch again when I have something important to do. [Spoilers]

Reign Over Me was quite good as well. It's nice to see Adam Sandler act normally again. Although I must say, his whiny voice has the uncanny ability to make me feel like stabbing his face with a fork. I honestly don't know whether that's his real voice or not because if it is, then I have nothing against him. Fuck that voice in particular.

*

A Feast for Crow's ending nearly raped my aorta.

"Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait a minute, wait a
minute! Where’s Dany and the dragons? Where’s Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. That can’t
be all of it... .”

Well, no. There’s more to come. Another book as big as this one.

I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages
and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that
the book had become too big to publish in a single volume... and I wasn’t close to finished yet.

To tell all of the story that I wanted to tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.

The simplest way to do that would have been to take what I had, chop it in half around the
middle, and end with “To Be Continued.” The more I thought about that, however, the more I
felt that the readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters,
rather than half the story for all the characters. So that’s the route I chose to take.
Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters
you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons,
which will focus on events along the Wall and across the sea, just as the present book focused on
King’s Landing.

—George R. R. Martin June 2005

What. The. Fuck. Thank God I have the fifth book with me or else I would've spontaneously combusted and go on a killing spree before the flames consumed me. Which would only last a minute or so; given that the lift is working. That's not an effective analogy at all come to think. Ah well.