Gripe Gripe Gripe

It's hard to wait for something.

I should be better at it than I am, but I'm not.

What did I do after reading the entire Wheel of Time series, up to its then-current release? I thanked God that I'd picked it up after Brandon Sanderson (my idol and most terrible enemy) was tapped to finish the story begun by the late great Robert Jordan. What could it have been like, can you imagine? Or do you just remember? You've been reading for as much as seventeen years... things are just starting to converge.... and then.... nothing. Suspense without release, not unlike a noose.
For me, it was simply re-discovering a series I had only known by its cover(s), resting on a bookshelf at my parents' house - I tell you, it's something about the covers of some fantasy novels that had always put me off before, which is why the Kindle is such a dangerous thing for me to own - re-discovering it, unaware that the author had died, and reading on and on. Biiig books, but I get through them all soon enough (might have taken a break between a few of them, that's a lot of reading) and more or less all in one chunk of time. Then I get to the end-for-now, things are really reaching the climax... but the next book's not out.
That was actually OK, definitely not the worst I've been through. I finished the last-at-the-time, The Gathering Storm (book 12), just a couple months before the currently-most-recent, second-to-last-of-all, Towers of Midnight (book 13), was to come out. I had to wait a little longer because they held back the digital release and I didn't mind too much for the extra time to have it on the Kindle like the other 12. Plus Robert Jordan (and later B. Sanderson) kept the pacing slow enough that patience is kind of a by-product of the reading experience. There's a lot of characters to keep up with once you go past ten or fifteen thousand pages of text. Patience, yeah. Check. Still excited for A Memory of Light, no idea when to expect it."early 2012" they say. Well at least there's a chance of seeing it before the end of the world; if it had been "late 2012" I'd be more worried.

It's not an uncommon thing, though, and I'm sure some of you have your own stories to share about the long hard wait. I recently caught up with the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik; the next book is... somewhere in the future, yes? But most recently... just last night, actually.... I finished Changes, the most recent book in the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. I'm having a harder time here; it ended on a cliffhanger! A cliffhanger! There haven't been cliffhanger endings in this series, and now, just when I'm reading it, there is one!
But hell, the next book comes out at the end of July. I'm sure I'll cope. This can hardly compare to when I finished A Feast for Crows; not only did it end with several cliffhangers, G.R.R. Martin (big props for your parents naming you GRR, by the way) said outright that the next book would cover the stories of characters that didn't fit into Crows; better all the story for half the characters than half the story for all of them, was his point, and a valid one. Still, it means that not only must I wait for the next book (A Dance with Dragons, out July 12, not much longer now), I must wait for the one after that ("Winds of Winter", release TBA) to know what happens to the cliffhanger characters from Crows and so on from there. That is going to be some kind of wait. But I respect an author who writes so much story that the books start breeding and multiplying, so I forgive Martin for any inconvenience this causes me.

books I can't wait for, but have to anyway:
A Memory of Light, duh
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher, as mentioned already
Likewise A Dance with Dragons, likewise Crucible of Gold (Temeraire #7)
City of Dragons by Robin Hobb
Whatever the second Stormlight Archive book is; damn you Brandon Sanderson - "late 2012". The world better not end or you and I will have long conversations in the next one.
any forthcoming book starring Johannes Cabal, be he Necromancer, Detective, or otherwise
The sequel to The Black Prism, or alternatively the post-sequel to the Way of Shadows trilogy that Brent Weeks hinted at. Preferably both.
The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett
The third Kingkiller book by Patrick Rothfuss... though I sense that in a way, I don't want it to come out too soon, either; it'll be over that much sooner, then. Ah, this may be one series I re-read several times
Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch, due in November
... oh, likely others. And this is in no particular order, not even the order in which I remembered them. When I think about any of them, it's Republic of Thieves that I get most anxious for. That's such a good story! Perhaps an ambitious fellow like myself would be so inclined as to start reviewing books on his oh-so-handy-but-fairly-aimless blog? Perhaps so! Maybe one of you people would be inclined to perhaps read something I recommend strongly?

If so, I cannot sufficiently recommend this book: The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. Read it. 'Nuff said.