A New Spectator in the Game of Thrones

I am sooo late to the Game of Thrones party. Up until about a month ago, I didn't buy into either the hype of the show or the books. I tried reading Song of Ice and Fire about two years prior, but two chapters in, I got bored and gave up. A year later, my wife borrowed the first season of the TV show, but she only watched one episode. "Wasn't very interesting," she said. I trusted her take, and seeing as how the book didn't strike a chord with me, she returned the borrowed Blu-Ray. Looking back, I can't believe how wrong we both were.

Last month, a friend of my wife's told her we owed her three episode of Game of Thrones. She let us borrow her copy of Season One and told us to watch three episodes and you'll be hooked, but you have to watch three. It only took two episodes.

I picked up the book again after watching a few episodes of the show. Before, I'd been lost by George R.R. Martin's long descriptions and the deluge of character names. Now I was finally able to match up names with faces. The multiple houses in the land of Westeros no longer seemed so strange. The biggest bummer was that the show moves at a much quicker pace than the book. A quarter of the way through Song of Ice and Fire I finished Season One, effectively spoiling the end of the book for me.

I'm now over halfway done with the first book and today, my wife and I started the fourth season of the TV show. I know the plot points ahead of me, but that isn't slowing me down. Why? The book has so much more meat to it than the show, at least so far it does. I was telling a friend watching the show is like listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, but you fast forward 10 seconds every two minutes or so. At the end, you feel moved by the music, but there's all these little parts that you missed. You weren't able to listen to and absorb the full album.

I'm going to keep watching the show and reading the books. I love how Martin builds his world. Magic, only whispered about in the beginning, is slowly resurging. His heroes are brave, and his villains are brutal, although not all are incapable of redemption. The only downside I've found so far is that after binge watching, I get caught up in the world of Westeros. I think to myself how I'm going to marry off Jacobi and merge my house with another. We have to stay strong. Winter is coming.