Reply To: Hobby Weekender 15/03/2019 – The 2000's

[mageParticipant 20596xp 2]

1. ‘…what books, movies, comics, TV series or anime from the 2000’s surprised you or was most memorable?

 

I’m going to do one post about books, one about movies, one about comics, one about TV series and one about Anime. Buckle up.

Books

When I finished school in 2004 my reading and interest in it started to decline. This was due to happenstance with: becoming an adult, going to college (the course concerned was 38 ish hours a week, with two hours commute each day on public transport) part time work at the same time (doing 28 – 35 hours a week, part time my ass), starting my current job and meeting my sons mother (now my ex) in 2010 I had a lot going on.

Not a million miles away from what some of you were saying about the 1980s or 1990s.

As a kid I read Goosebumps (I read other stuff too but kind of forced to by school/parents that I had no real interest in) before discovering the Hobbit (forced to pick a book in school to read and write about, this was it) and loving it and transitioning into Lord of the Rings.

This brings me up to around 1999. At the same time I got into Terry Pratchett, but lost interest in the mid 2000s. I found that some of his books changed focus between different characters and genres (Rincewind and the Watch were my favourite by far) that I lost interest in what was essentially a series about a loosely connected world when random books about newer characters appeared it felt kind of… forced.

With that being my background in reading and what I was up to at the time, I started reading Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire to the initiated) in the mid to later 2000s. The card game was going pretty strong in my local games club and the owner, workers and members at said shop (The Gathering, in Limerick, still there btw) were all reading the series and all fans. What made me want to read it is how, at random points on nights out, be it earlier, later, waaaay later, at conventions, in pubs or back at a guys apartment: it ALWAYS got brought up, anecdotes about parts of the story were told, cool scenes were described and it was mentioned with such passion. So I was on board.

Or so I thought. I forgot about it. I started my current job toward the end of the 2000s. After a year or so my father and I went to Portugal. I had forgotten to bring a gaming supplement (which was very unlike me) or book to read (as I mainly ‘fell’ out of reading’) but I did pick up the first book in the ASOIAF series which was at the airport book shop: Game of Thrones. The flight flew and I read the book on holidays. Kept reading it when I got back, finished it and loved it. This was before HBO announced the series was even in development. I found GRRM’s writing style smooth, easy to read, detailed, descriptive but not clunky, convoluted, contrived nor self-indulgant.

For those of you who have not read the first book (I wont even get into the Series V the books) then you really should: Roose Bolton is introduced earlier, there are far more characters, the plots and story details go into way further detail and not just detail for detail’s sake, and you really get inside other characters heads and get mentions of things and hints that point toward the origin of different things in the world as well as a few theories about legends and other figures in the setting that don’t really get broached upon by the TV show.

Also if you say you’re a huge fan of GoT, play wargames, read but have never read ASOIAF, Im sorry, but I laugh in your face. If you’re a nerd and on this site and match the criteria of the previous sentence and you really don’t have time to read ONE book in the series, but do have time for TV/anime/comics/youtubers/reading a rules or gaming supplement/hobbying then you go down two levels of respect in my eyes. It makes you a hipster.

And I hate hipsters. Hipsters will be there along with the cockroaches after nuclear war* kills off humanity (real human beings).

*Or some other extinction level event.