The Games of Throne by George R. R. Martin

Sometimes it takes a colleague who insisted or a friend who encouraged you to read something new. Truth be told I read all of Harry Potters, Hunger Games, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, No. 1 Ladies Detective, the Twilight Series books and movies and I don’t own any of it.

It’s with scepticism that I read the first book of the Game of Thrones loaned by my colleague. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it. Another colleague said she tried to read the book but due to the many characters she couldn’t get into the book and left it unfinished. I usually read the books then watched the movies, but in this case it was the other way round and I think watching the series first gives it a better reading experience because then all the scenes started to come alive when I read the relevant text.

I’m not a great fan of fantasy epic and saga. I don’t like fantasy for fantasy sake. Lord of the Rings movies were good but I didn’t read any of the books. What George R.R. Martin did well was to draw parables with real life. We know someone like Tyrion who has more wit than brawn, we also know someone like Jon Snow who has more brawn than brain, we know lots of b*tches to a lesser extent like Cersei, we also know a Varys who always play the mind game and seems to know everything, we also know a Stannis that despite his best efforts all fell to nothing, we also know a religious fanatic like he and his wife. All in all, I thought here I am 20 years too late since the book is published, 8 years too late since I watched the series and it doesn’t really matter at all.

After I finished the first book I thought to myself: you know what? Even if I have all the books on Kindle, even if I bought so many book sets for my boys and none for myself, even if the series have ended and we know the end of it….. I’m still going to enjoy reading it and picking up all the details that I have missed on the show and string a coherent context and background of what I saw on screen. The character development and coming of age story for all main characters were good, the war strategy and political games were nicely played out, complex web of plots and deceptions are weaved; we owe it to GRRM the author to put it out for us on top of a very engaging writing style and storytelling. Truly a masterpiece and one that I would take my time and savour it. Here’s to many happy hours of reading to come! ❤️😍

I encourage you to give the book a go. Not without watching the series, of course; and that too I binged watch 8 seasons of GoT throughout the month of May 2019!

A beautiful Harper collection of the Games of Thrones A Song of Ice and Fire book series that comes with a map of Westeros, all for £30 at Amazon.co.uk.

About the writer:

George Raymond Richard Martin (born George Raymond Martin, September 20, 1948), also known as GRRM, is an American novelist and short story writer in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres, screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known for his series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011–2019). In 2005, Lev Grossman of Time called Martin “the American Tolkien”,and in 2011, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

The family first lived in a house on Broadway, belonging to Martin’s great-grandmother. In 1953, they moved to a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks. During Martin’s childhood, his world consisted predominantly of “First Street to Fifth Street”, between his grade school and his home; this limited world made him want to travel and experience other places, but the only way of doing so was through his imagination, and he became a voracious reader. Martin began writing and selling monster stories for pennies to other neighbourhood children, dramatic readings included. He also wrote stories about a mythical kingdom populated by his pet turtles; the turtles died frequently in their toy castle, so he decided they were killing each other off in “sinister plots”.

In 1970, Martin earned a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude; he went on to complete his M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Medill. Eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War, to which he objected, Martin applied for and obtained conscientious objector status; he instead did alternative service work for two years (1972–1974) as a VISTA volunteer, attached to the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation.