How on earth have you managed to avoid any info on casting as a GoT fan, except for the two you mentioned? Very impressive! Really curious to see what you think of books 4 and 5 given how you feel about his writing.
An update. I got done with the first book again last week. I hadn’t read it since 2001, and I’d forgotten a lot of it.
What’s really interesting is that I have a co-worker who has never read the books, and only seen the TV show. And I’ve never seen the TV show but only read the books. So as I was making my way through the book, I’d catch up with him about how this happened, and that happened, and do you remember when such and such character did that? And we were able to totally connect our experiences in each instance. That was amazing to me. So the TV show is faithful enough that I almost couldn’t tell that we had absorbed the story through two different media.
Now that I’m on the second book though, that changed for the first time. He asked me about Stannis Barristone’s daughter, and as we were talking about her, I mentioned her ‘fool’, and he looked at me blankly. Apparently that’s not a character in the TV series. It makes sense that differences between the book and the TV series should start to emerge in the second season, since the 2nd book was so much thicker than the first one, but presumably had to be fit into the same number of episodes.
Truly, you are a disciple ;)
(Baratheon is the house of Robert, Stannis, and Renly. And yes, I’m aware of the fact I’m a terrible person.)
It’s perfectly ok and even best to watch the series and read the books afterwards, cause this way you can get additional details in the books, while the other way around just lands you bitching about omissions like some …here…
There were definitely some things in the book i didn’t want to see on TV. It disturbed me enough to read about it. I cannot imagine how they would have handled it on screen.
This is actually in some ways why I haven’t made getting the show a priority. I watched the first season (I got it on Blu Ray for Christmas that first year) and I liked it a lot, but I think just sticking with the books alone is totally viable.
The show has sunk lower than the books in terms of graphic and/or exploitative scenes. Littlefinger wiping cum from a whore’s face before she kisses the next patron in season 2, Jaime raping Cersei, Ramsay raping Sansa.
It depends. the book gets away with character ages that would be beyond shocking to modern TV audiences.
Yes, but accurate based on “the times”, assuming normal earth type middle ages apply.
Yeah the castle with the soup… I think that was very, very mild in show compared to what the book covers about those capture scenes with Arya and everything.
Not saying the opposite, just saying there’s potentially very shocking material in the books (because of the character’s ages) left out of the TV show. Much more shocking (for most people, I think) than what we got.
I had little problem with it since as you say it reflect the “times” but I completely understood people who were put off.
But that’s based on reading about it. Seeing it would have been very different, I think.
Exactly. We’d be appalled at a 12yo girl given to an arranged marriage, but that was the legal age in Europe by the 1200s if memory serves.
So far this re-read has been surprising. There’s so much I don’t remember at all. I don’t just mean I couldn’t remember it until I read it, I mean that it reads as if it’s new to me. The major exceptions were mostly in the first book. And the first book really was nice, but nothing extraordinary. I didn’t remember much about Clash of Kings specifically, but I remember that’s when I fell in love with the series, since it got so much better. And I’m currently in Clash of Kings, and now I see why I felt that way. Nearly every chapter ramps up the action or intrigue. And it all feels new to me again. I don’t remember most of this stuff. Waiting 15 years between readings worked in making it completely fresh again.
I last read book 3 in 2003 and recently reread it and loved all the details I’d forgotten. Even the overall structure of the book is fantastic, Groell does a great job arranging the order of the chapters.
Having finished Clash of Kings yesterday, I’m pretty excited to start Storm of Swords today.
So far the story is divided into three stories: The East across the Narrow Sea. That tale was really interesting in Game of Thrones, but was mostly just basic setup mode in Clash of Kings. Then there’s the Others coming to the Wall story. That story started off the series in Game of Thrones, making me believe (falsely) that this was what the series would mainly be about. But it was all setup in Game of Thrones, and all setup in Clash of Kings. And then there’s the third story: the main story of Westeros. In Game of Thrones is was about Ned’s Stark naivety. In Clash of Kings it was about the power vacuum and the four kings that tried to fill it. And what an amazing story that was. It was definitely the central thrust of Clash, and it was just so masterfully setup and told.
One thing that didn’t mesh with my recollection of the series from 2001’s reading of it is that I remembered Jaime Lannister playing a pretty big part. But in Game of Thrones he was hardly there, and in Clash of Kings he played an even smaller role. So what I was remembering must all be from Storm of Swords. What’s also interesting is that with the physical books I read, I didn’t realize how much larger the third book is compared to the 2nd. Clash of Kings was estimated to take 24 hours when I started reading it, but Storm of Swords is estimated at 36 hours. Which means it’s quite a bit larger.
As large as these books are though, it’s hard to believe that he can finish this epic tale in only 7 books, as originally planned. Even if you now make it 8, since book 4 had to be split into two books, I keep running into so many threads in Clash of Kings which indicate something will happen way down the line. And at some points these three stories have to come together. But just Westeros is such a complex story as told in Clash and Storms, it’s hard to believe how he’s going to weave the other two stories into it at some point.
We shall see.
At present, I’m just really happy I decided to re-read these books. This is masterful storytelling.
If I were to re-read, I would probably skip Dany’s arc. I find that really tedious.
There is a lot of point of view on Jamie Lannister, I too have forgotten which book it is in, but he was truly an interesting take and twist to the story. I enjoyed his arc a lot.
Um… Danny’s arc is amazing, so many people felt so there is a version of the books that’s ONLY Danny’s tale, iirc.
I quickly became bored with Danny’s story line. I also really liked what became of Jamie’s.
And does anybody really think GRRM is going to finish this series?
I’m in book 3 now, and Storm of Swords actually starts with Jamie’s perspective after the prologue. So it was definitely the third book that I was remembering, since I haven’t read anything after that. (Yet).
I found Danny’s story fascinating in Game of Thrones. But after the dragons are born at the end of Book 1, the story did get a bit boring in Book 2 as her rag tag crew wandered the deserts and abandoned city and bustling merchant city. I don’t recall what happens in the third book, but I remember thinking that her story got interesting again in the third book. We’ll see. Maybe I’m projecting wishful thinking into my memories.
In the first three books, I was kind of so-so on Dany’s parts. They were written in a much more “epic” scale than the Westeros portions, which could be jarring when interspersed with the more personal stories that GRRM was telling in the Seven Kingdoms.
Like many, I didn’t care for Dany’s story in the fourth and fifth books at all. Meereen was dullsville. But on a second reading, I actually saw a lot more nuance in it than the first time and came to enjoy it a great deal.