I read A Game of Thrones this past month. The whole experience has been a saga.

I actually knew about George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series before the TV show first started airing in 2011. My mom is a big fantasy reader, and since I was a child I’ve been regaled with tales of a Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Store in Manhattan that I’ve never been to and I think has since closed. An article from last August cites that “the first” science fiction book store has opened in NYC… the author probably doesn’t know this isn’t the first of its kind, but it’s obviously the first in long enough that the author isn’t aware that it isn’t the first of its kind.

Anyway, I’ve known about ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ for quite some time. My mom has been bugging me to read it for years, and my two best friends have as well. After about a year of yet another friend insisting I watch the show, I finally did, watching seasons 1 and 2 in quick fashion, since they were both out by the time I got around to it.

It’s a really good show.

So as the third season started airing, I decided that I was going to read the series. I finally got around to reading the first book, A Game of Thrones, this past month. Part of what held me up was the book’s size. My mom has them all in hard cover, and they’re enormous. When I was younger it was the length of the book that scared me off, but this time what I found so intimidating was the actual size of the copy of the novel. It’s not exactly a book you can carry around discreetly in your purse. It’s heavy and requires its own car seat.

I finally cracked and bought the five book bundle on Kindle for $40, which is $10 less than if I’d purchased them separately on Kindle or purchased the cheapest paperback editions.

My favorite part of the book is how much more detailed the story is for me now. I had to do a lot of background reading to help understand the show, while trying to avoid the really huge spoilers. It always helps me if I understand about the houses and their histories and stuff like that.

I get they couldn’t fit all that into the show, but I loved learning it in the book. It’s fantastically detailed and clear. I naturally expected the book to be more detailed, but I was a bit afraid that due to the show cutting a lot of stuff out/changing a lot of stuff or an author who writes particularly dense, uninteresting prose.

I really enjoy how Cersei is somehow even more unlikeable in print, although nothing matches my loathing for Joffrey.

The only thing I don’t like much about the book, and it’s a weird thing, but I can’t help it: the great detail Martin goes into when describing food and feast sequences. I don’t care what the lord commander of the Night’s Watch eats for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or what Robert Baratheon stuffs his face with, or the type of wine Tyrion prefers, etc…

And even if I do care about those things, I only care about them once. I don’t care about them described a billion times. Really, it might have been a billion times he went into it.

Still though, I really enjoyed this book. Eddard was way better, although I continue to mostly dislike Catelyn.

This might be one of those series that I have to evaluate as a series, because you get almost no answers to any questions in the first book. I do like the idea that the series will be that complicated, but it makes it hard to evaluate each book when you haven’t read all of them and all of them aren’t available.

I’ve started the second book, A Clash of Kings, but I’m in no rush to finish – the sixth and seventh books aren’t out yet, and George R.R. Martin can go 5 or 6 years…or more… without releasing one.

He better not die.

Tagged: authors: george r.r. martin, books: a game of thrones, genre: fantasy