The cover for Empire of Grass is absolutely breathtaking.

I know that it's common wisdom to say, "Never judge a book by its cover," but I think that old saying fails when it comes to Michael Whelan. That being said, I love Tad Williams, and I'm looking forward to reading this...the 2nd book in a new trilogy by Tad Williams set in the world of Osten Ard. This cover manages to look serene, peaceful, and yet epic all at the same time.

To Green Angel Tower is a beautiful book whose point seems to be to get into the head of the characters so as to find a home there.

Artist Michael Whelan did the cover for all of the Osten-Ard books, including the newest one released this year called

The Witchwood Crown. This is his rendering of themes in the book. I think "Green Angel Tower" is in the

background on the right (far away) over what looks like the Hayholt, which is the setting for much of the book

as it is also the ancient Sithi city of Asu'a. On the left are Sithi who might be Jiriki and Aditu? Not sure to be honest.

On the right must be Miriamelle and Simon, although I think they look a bit old for their characters.

I finally finished the mighty and complex To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams. At 1066 pages, it may be the biggest book I have ever read. It's twenty pages longer than George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons. It's also an infinitely better book because it concludes everything, every last dangling end, that is left in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (the trilogy/quadrilogy) that this novel belongs to. I say "quadrilogy" only because my copy (which is over twenty years old) is just one book. It has since been split into two novels, because it should have been two books to begin with. It's incredibly awkward lugging around a book that is over a thousand pages. It's awkward to hold, awkward to read, and just an overall pain in the ass. I guess that's "score one" for ebooks.

I actually loved this series, and at one point at the end, I cried a bit because the reunion between Rachel "the Dragon" and her adopted son, Simon, was so touching. Rachel was the most minor of characters. As head of the chambermaids in the Hayholt (the epicenter of the story), her sole reason for existing was to leave food in the many tunnels and caverns of the old Sithi city called Asu'a that exists beneath the Hayholt. All so that her adopted son, gone on an adventure to retrieve some mystical sword in the far north, and then to lend himself to the "good" side of an ancient civil war, would find nourishment when he was lost beneath the castle on his quest for "Bright Nail," one of three swords that used to be called "Memory" before it was remade.

The plot of this overall story is super simple, and as I finished this immense book I asked myself why this worked and didn't work for me. I asked myself why Tad Williams's style both fascinated and infuriated me, but in the end was something that I loved. These books are so long because Tad Williams spends so much time in his character's heads. Simon got tied to a water wheel as a torture that was meant to kill him. But it ended up being tortuous for me because Simon in a kind of "state of delirium" was in a dream-like sequence for over a hundred (if not hundreds) of pages. It was chapter after chapter after chapter of Simon trying to make sense of things that he was seeing in this dream-like trance (which was overall important to the book). But holy crap did it go on forever.

There is so much dreaming in these books. So many characters are wandering in absolute darkness for chapter after chapter, and in such conditions, Mr. Williams goes inside the character's thoughts and that's where you reside...thinking on things for endless amounts of time (hundreds of pages). But the payoff for all of that long and drawn out detail to the point of choking on it was that there was an incredible emotional catharsis when Simon was reunited with Rachel. All the things that happened at the end of the story felt like they had been earned. Everything, in fact, felt earned and the ending left me so satisfied that I have immediately purchased the sequel, which just came out a month ago (the start of a new trilogy) called The Witchwood Crown (book 1 of The Last King of Osten-Ard).

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is one of those trilogies that I think everyone should read, and then no one should read. Not everyone is capable of picking up a single book of a thousand pages, much less three of them (the other two are slimmer at 600 to 700 pages). So if you are one of these people, you really should never touch these books. They also lack the spine-tingling moments that George R.R. Martin seems to be able to create in his narratives of similar length. But it has been more rewarding to spend time with Williams's characters than it has been to spend time with Martin's (maybe because Martin just kills all of them off). Williams too has a high body count, but he seems to be ready to invest in the ones that consistently control the narrative in a way that says "there will be a nice payoff to all of this suffering." And by the end of To Green Angel Tower, I was deeply in love with the characters that survived the apocalyptic events that passed at the Hayholt (which is the most important setting of this book). In a word, it was beautiful.

These epic fantasy novels that I'm exploring break the mould on every other kind of writing that I'm familiar with. They don't seem to care about word count, nor do they seem to care that certain tropes are repeated. For all these pages, the point seems to be to get into the heads of the characters and find a home there. Tad Williams says as much through Simon and a minor character called Morgenes. "Make your home inside your head," he tells Simon. It's good advice considering that (for a boy as young as Simon) leaving his childhood home is the most frightening experience of all.

So that's your audience when it comes to this stuff. Most people probably haven't even clued into this, thinking that they need to spin stories of complexity and magic in order to write epic fantasy. Nope, it's all about the character and getting it to fit like a glove on the reader. I wonder how I could use that to my own benefit, without writing myself into the weeds.

Tad Williams' excellent trilogy that began with The Dragonbone Chair did more than just influence Martin and other fantasy genre writers for decades.

I have steadily been making my way through the 1000+ page final book in Tad Williams trilogy called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. The title of the book is To Green Angel Tower, and I'm about 850 pages into this monstrosity and getting pretty excited that the ending is within sight. I've enjoyed reading these books, but there's a sense of accomplishment too in closing this particular long-winded tale.

Because of the size of this trilogy (the other two books clock in at a mere 600 pages of written text) there have been typos. As I read over them I thought to myself, I used to get upset at this kind of thing. But given the sheer size of novels of this type, I now declare that it is an impossible task to find each duplicated word and incorrect spelling. Or for that matter, each omitted word that would make the sentence in which it appears sense. No editor, nor even a team of editors, is capable of catching all of those mistakes, even those who work for a "big house publisher." I suppose that change in my thinking is a result of me working with editors and doing editing myself. There's a reason why authors should pay attention to their word count. Anything that soars beyond 120,000 words is going to be too big of a job to handle and To Green Angel Tower (according to the internet) is 520,000 words. That just blows my mind as I type it. All of those words held between one cover.

Anyway, there are a few takeaways that I thought I'd share about Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I was drawn to these books because George R.R. Martin was heavily influenced by them, and I can see that influence all over the place. Even if you've only watched the television show, read the following and tell me if you note any similarities:

1) There's an ancient race of immortal beings that live far to the north. They are called The Norns, and they are pure evil. They use magic to turn living men into monsters under their complete control...kind of like zombies...and when the Norns arrive they bring the winter with them. Huge, cold storms that freeze weapons in sheaths and blind the eyes of defenders with snow in blizzards that are intense and frightening.

2) The Norns are led by the Storm King, Ineluki, a being that is undead and who has the ability to mess with anyone who can use this thing called "The Dream Road" very similar to how Bran's ability works in Game of Thrones. And what Ineluki does to you on The Dream Road has very real implications in the real world. Additionally, the Dream Road allows those who travel it to visit and see any points in the past as if they were bearing witness to them as they actually happened.

3) There is a girl with dark hair who is the daughter of the king, and her name is "Miriamelle" but it is abbreviated "Marya." She is a cunning fighter type character who continuously makes poor choices that impact her quality of life, but she ends up being all the stronger for it.

4) There is a small character called Binabik and he's a race called Quanuc. Many times, he's likened to a child or even a dwarf. He also talks exactly like Tyrion Lannister does in Game of Thrones. Here's one of his lines: "Winter is not being the time for naked swimming." And here's another, "If you wish to carry a hungry weasel in your pocket, it is your choice." Binabik's role in the story is to "know things" as he is an important member of this organization called "The League of the Scroll."

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that George R.R. Martin copied Tad Williams. George R.R. Martin has written his own epic (if we don't just flat out admit that Martin has written himself into the weeds). However, he was correct to admit that he was heavily influenced by Tad Williams, and I think that's awesome because it's clear that George borrowed or expanded upon a lot of Mr. Williams' ideas (and I really do mean "a lot"). The only thing bad about any of this is that if one author does it, then there will be more that I haven't come across who will also be similarly tempted. For example, winter and evil have been inextricably linked by these two fantasy series, "Winter is coming" and all that. I think it's fair to say that no fantasy writer henceforth should ever make winter a source of evil, lest the whole "cold brings death" thing become hopelessly cliché, among other things :). And that's too bad, because there are countless writers out there who probably want to describe the approach of something evil as having a "chilling effect" on a protagonist. But you'd best not do it if you want to be original is all I'm saying.

And maybe the talk of cliché's in literature is utterly useless anyway. Any of us are only capable of reading "X" amount of books within our lifetimes. As long as we pick and choose ones that have original ideas to us, then who cares if they borrowed ideas from other books as long as we haven't read them? Maybe that's the point of it all, and a way to tailor the reading experience to a unique individual.