''Song of Ice and Fire" series can help guide people through tough times

undated () — — Last spring, I read good things about writer George R.R. Martin and "A Song of Ice and Fire," his series of fantasy books. So I picked up the first volume, "A Game of Thrones" — now also an Emmy-winning HBO series — and dug in.

Three months and nearly 5,000 pages later, I emerged, blinking my eyes like a guy encountering sunlight after being stuck in a dark cell for too long.

The five books captured my summer.

I had company.

The verbose tomes have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. When Random House released "A Dance with Dragons" in July — the fifth in a planned seven-book series — the $35, 1,040-page work sold 298,000 copies on its first day.

The reasons for the books' success must be manifold — superb plotting, Martin's uncanny aptitude for rigging cliff-hangers, the series' colorful world, strong characters, soap-opera drama and HBO.

I think there's something else, too: The books serve as compelling guides for navigating our increasingly rough-and-tumble world.

And these days, the more guides, the better.

Corporate rung-grabbers, frustrated parents, diplomats, political tacticians and just about anybody else trying to get ahead can glean gobs of advice from the books. The messages aren't pretty: Tearing through "A Song of Ice and Fire" isn't akin to reading business-world, can-do classics such as Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

For one thing, there are all of those swords.

Most of us don't have to deal with blade-wielding knights. Our world does not swell with torturers, executioners, giants, spells and general lawlessness — a lawlessness verging on anarchy. So why should we accept pointers from a fictional world awash in all of the above? How could the strategic nuances in this strange place matter to a midlevel manager at a Denver energy company, listening to ESPN radio on his way to work from Littleton?

They matter because Martin, 63, is a keenly observant, well-read author. He hatched his own world with "A Song of Ice and Fire," but it didn't emerge out of ether — it was forged through experience and contemplation here, in this real world.

In short, Martin knows a thing or two about the mechanics of human struggle, with its attendant triumphs and failures.