After that last book, I was feeling a bit disillusioned with my reading challenge. I hadn’t enjoyed the last few books as much as I’d hoped, and there were so many books that weren’t on the list that I actually wanted to read. So why was I wasting time with books I didn’t care about? In light of that miniature crisis, I’ve been taking a break for the last couple weeks.

I, like millions of other people, am a big fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Reading it was one of the first things I did after graduating from USF, and I’ve been hooked since. Like many other GRRM nuts, I’ve spent a lot of spare time reading blogs and forums, listening to others engage in rampant speculation as they try to guess what will happen next — and it only gets worse (or better, depending on how you look at it) the more the next book gets pushed back. But reading over and over about The Grand Northern Conspiracy gets tiresome after a while. What I really needed was some actual content.

I’d been hearing for a while about the Dunk and Egg novellas. These short novels take place in Westeros a couple generations before the start of A Game of Thrones. They originally appeared in the fantasy anthologies Legends, Legends II and Warriors, and currently they are only available in those books or in graphic novel format (a collection of the three existing novellas will be released this fall). I just wanted to read the damn stories, so I tracked them down in PDF format and read them through the Kindle app on my tablet.

These three stories follow the lowborn hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg (secretly Aegon Targaryen, nephew of King Aerys I) and their adventures traveling through Westeros. Together they blunder into dangerous situations, expose treachery, and act as agents of justice. They’re short, easy reads — not nearly the level of stress and drama one gets reading ASOIAF.

I liked these novellas. They’re pretty formulaic, but have just enough little twists and turns in the plots to keep things interesting. And if you’re versed in your knowledge of Westeros, there are plenty of familiar names and locations mentioned throughout. It really adds to the rich complexity of the world that GRRM has created.

I don’t think I can really say anything here that hasn’t been said a million times all across the Internet, and I don’t want to give any spoilers, but if you’re a fan of ASOIAF, or if you enjoy watching Game of Thrones and don’t yet have the courage to take on the books, these are a great way to pass the time until The Winds of Winter and/or Season 5 comes out.

So that was a nice little detour. I’m already back to my reading challenge list — for now.