Winter is awesome...

Been working up to this one, but now I’ve reached the summit at last. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book associated with the label of “fantasy” attached to it. So often the genre conventions have been done to death and there’s this awkwardness that can be painful at times. Admit it –someone recommends a “fantasy” novel to you, your eyes may roll up in your head and you may question the source. I used to read the genre a lot, then seemed to have an impossible time finding anything that hooked me.

Then I heard about A Game of Thrones. I have to admit, it took my hearing about the elaborate HBO series for A Game of Thrones to hit my radar. An enormous medievel looking TV series starring Sean Bean, Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage?! What the!?! I soon learned that George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones is just the first book in a colossal series that’s been amassing a rabid hoard of readers since 1996. Wow, was I ever late to the party. There are art books, role playing games, websites, you name it.

Let’s not mince words: A Game of Thrones is easily the best fantasy novel I’ve read in 20 years.

Having just finished it, I’m in a state of complete stunned awe. Where to even begin? Set in some distant quasi-medievel era, the book follows the machinations and conspiracies between the Stark and Lannister families; echoing the War of the Roses, we’re given a story ripe with betrayal and avarice and foreboding that is simply impossible to put down. It’s got the manipulations of I, Claudius with the pulp immediacy of The Sopranos on a canvas befitting The Lord of the Rings. There are hosts of rival families, at times recalling the rancor between the Atreides and Harkonnen families in Dune. As mayhem and power-grabs abound, something else is happening. In this world, winter is about to return in what may be a decades-long ice age. The northern part of the kingdom is fenced-off by a colossal 700 foot wall of ice, guarded by the ever-vigilant cadre of the Night’s Watch. What are they guarding us from? What lives on the other side of that wall?

Don’t look to me for answers. What I’ll just say is that the characters in this book are beyond phenomenal. Cersei Lannister and Eddard Stark are classic characters. Cersei Lannister… just know that you’ll be turning pages and losing sleep and gnashing your teeth like a madman – dying to know what happens next but at the same time, hoping it never ends. And wow, does this book end. But there is clearly so much more to come, with book five in the series just annouced as publishing this coming July.

Make no mistake, this is no kid's fantasy series. This is material for adults. The level of detail and atmosphere is astonishing, the characters are remarkable, the battles like nothing you’ve read before. The level of craft in Martin’s writing is just so above average, he’s got this reader utterly hypnotized. It was just such a tremendous pleasure to read.

I guess I’m still kind of shaking a bit from this reading experience. It was so satisfying. I can scarcely believe that in a bit more than a month, this epic saga will be unspooling before my hungry eyeballs. If it’s one-tenth the story the book is, this is the television event of the decade. Read this damn book!!!