My Current Reading Focus

I am currently in the process of reading five books...and each is a part of a series.  I am continuing George R.R. Martin's celebrated fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire as I am nearing the end of the second book, titled A Clash of Kings.  I am also on the second book in Terry Goodkind's twelve-part series The Sword of Truth, having begun it a week ago.  Its title is Stone of Tears.  Also in the second book of a series, this one a bit shorter, I am delving into the "darker" side of the magical experience with Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye in his Bartimaeus Trilogy.  I am on the first of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy as well.  Finally, I've picked up a book I had abandoned a couple of years ago and am once again tackling the Bourne series of Robert Ludlum, right now a little way into the first volume, The Bourne Identity.  But with none of these series am I going to watch any derived movies or television series.  After all, I want to develop my imagination, not have images spoon-fed to me.  Besides, screen adaptations of novels have a tendency to deviate, sometimes very substantially, from the written word.  If memory serves me correctly, the little snippets I saw of The Bourne Identity movie version with Matt Damon deviated substantially from what little I had read...

Each of the five series I'm reading presents a rather unattractive picture of humanity: a cutthroat and brutal society that exalts violence and aggressive behavior.  That goes even for the alternative history in the children's series of  Bartimaeus, with an elitist social class of magicians dominating civil society and oppressing the general population. Ludlum's protagonist Jason Bourne struggles in the unforgiving world of international espionage while Martin, Goodkind, and Sanderson rachet up the savagery with medieval fantasy societies bent on war and vendettas.  All of this violence can get to be a bit numbing after a while, but at least with all five series the authors have developed some interesting, believable characters to follow.  Also, there is more than action to these stories: some pretty intense philosophical themes are presented and woven around the characters.  So I'm sticking with them all this time, all the way to the (possibly bitter) ends...