Summer has come

So it is now less than a week until A Dance with Dragons, the 5th book in George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, is out. The internet is supposedly flooded with spoilers, some of them fake, thanks to the Germans mistakenly shipping out nearly 200 copies of the book early. At this point I'm kind of irritated by the fact that whenever there's a media story about the series I have to stare at a photo of Sean Bean looking grave. I'm generally not a fan of film or television adaptations of science fiction or fantasy, but the near overshadowing of the literary production by the T.V. series of late gives me another reason to want to gripe. The Daily Beast has a very long and lush review (positive). Entertainment Weekly is more concise, ranking the books 3 > 1 > 5 > ...