Oh my gosh, where have I been since my last post?

Sucked In, that’s where.

I got sucked into reading the “Game of Thrones” series… I haven’t been able to put this thing down for some reason.  I bought it a couple years ago as a boxed set (if you can call e-books “boxed”), and only got around to opening it last month… And it’s a good thing it’s on my iPad, because otherwise the 4,000-or-so pages would really be weighing down my arms. I’m coming up on about 3500 pages and looking forward to the wrap-up, if for no other reason than being freed from its thrall…

But if you know these books, you’ve already caught my error: there are way more pages than that if you see this to the end. I’d assumed my boxed set was the whole series.

Last time I made this mistake? It was 1991. I was a high school senior mulling over my choices in the Fantasy section of a WaldenBooks store when a strange man popped up from nowhere, shoved a book at me, and practically hollered, “You HAVE to read this!!”

He was weird, but I bought the book (Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World). Read it, loved it, bought the second of the trilogy…

You know where this is going, don’t you? About midway through #3 I realized he couldn’t possibly wrap it all up here, and there was clearly going to be a fourth book. So I waited for that one to come out, pounced on it and devoured it—and realized he still wasn’t done. Waited for the next one, pounced, devoured… And I repeated that cycle through (count them!) FOURTEEN books—almost 12,000 pages—spread across 20 years.

But man-oh-man was that wait worth it. Let me put it this way: I’m an all-out “Lord of the Rings” fanatic… And Tolkien’s got nothing on Jordan.

And despite my recent sucked-in-ness with George R.R. Martin’s series (do you think he was trying to evoke Tolkien with the “R.R.”?), he’s got nothing on either of them. It’s actually been more than a day since I picked up my iPad, and I found myself more dismayed than thrilled that I had extra books ahead. Guess I’m running out of steam on this one—we’ll see if I pick back up. (It does go against the grain to leave it unfinished… But I want to be enjoying it!)

Well, in honor of getting “sucked in” to my reading, I’m going to finish today with another rendition of “Put it on a T-Shirt”… The Bookworm edition!

• If you think reading is boring, you’re doing it wrong
• The Pretend is near!
• Book Lovers never go to bed alone
• I read past my bedtime
• We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too.
• “I”m just finishing a chapter” always ends at four in the morning with a finished book
• If I’m ever stranded I hope it’s in a book store
• You can’t buy happiness but you can buy books, and that’s kind of the same thing.
• People who say I’m hard to shop for must not know where to buy books.
• “Too many books?” I think you mean “Not enough bookshelves.”
• I’m not addicted to reading—I can quit as soon as I finish this chapter.
• My Patronus is a Bookworm
• As soon as I finish this chapter. Oh look!—another chapter!

I know, it’s a short-ish list, but I really do have to go to bed. Maybe after I finish a chapter…