What is so freakin' good about Game of Thrones? I mean the book, not the tv show, which I haven't seen, but I have read about 2/5 of the actual novel. It is testimony to my appreciation of critics I admire that I have stuck with it thus far as to my mind it's confusing (too many characters and why should I care?), badly written (every time he gets a bit stuck he just shoves in a whole bunch of rambles about what happened tens of thousands of years before, presumably this relates to the days of old when knights were bold and toilets weren't invented), meandering, and stylistically totes irritating (this parallel universe stuff where the names are slightly differently spelled, etc; actually this borders on a kind of racism in places; the gypsyesque warriors and so on; the distant savage tribes with all those Ks in their names). Anyway, I'm on the edge of my seat throughout, wondering whether the next page will be the one where I throw the whole thing down never to retterne to ytte.
Or maybe it'll suddenly get good, though the 300 pages I've read so far have not set a precendent.
3 comments:
I see your point; everyone's still talking about it, right? Even though what they say might not necessarily be complimentary.
By the standards of its genre (high fantasy) it is 'gritty' and 'realistic' - there is little or no magic, the characters are slightly more rounded than puppets, there's a lot of sexual violence and the class system is depicted as being unpleasant, at least for the commoners.
A bit like how the current Batman movies are "serious" as opposed to earlier Batmans (Batmen?)
I read the first one just now but haven't been racing to read the sequels.
That makes sense, I've never read anything else in the ballpark, I've seen people reading them on the train occasionally... it's a load of crap, but I finished it, and have no compulsion to pick up the next or any other one in the series, that's for sure.
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