A Year of Ice and Fire: Prologue (A Game of Thrones)

So after watching "The Rains of Castamere," which was devastating in spite of my contempt for the way that storyline has been adapted over the past two years, I felt like I wanted to reread the books. I get that feeling once in a while, and mostly I ignore it because no matter how much I enjoy the series, I don't have time to reread 1.7 million words multiple times a year. But last night I was thinking about a gradual reread, one that would last a long time and not interfere with the other reading I do. Then I remembered that there are 344 chapters in the series (I counted them once; I do things like that), so one chapter a day would take nearly a year. And my latest soon-to-be-abandoned project was born...

Seriously, I think I can keep up with reading a chapter a day, but I doubt I'll always be able to blog about it. And some chapters don't offer much to talk about anyway. Like the prologue to A Game of Thrones. Two of its characters die right away, and the third becomes an ex-crow in the very next chapter, so there's not much to say about them. It's nice that Royce, instead of living and dying as your standard Nobleman/Fop, gets a moment of bravery. One thing that caught my attention was the talk of how the Wall was "weeping." Obviously it means the temperature is high enough that the Wall is melting slightly, but I don't think we've seen that image, or any description of the Wall's solidity at a given moment, used again, even elsewhere in this book. Am I wrong? We'll see.

I had also forgotten that the Others have a language. I'd been thinking of them more as a force of nature than a people. There's a George R. R. Martin interview I can't find at the moment where he suggests they may not have a culture in any way that we'd understand the term. One of the frustrating things about the dilation of the story is that revelations about the Others, which would have been reasonably paced over three books, have slowed to nothing over seven (or eight). Even the last Bran chapter in Dance, which really jolts the northern/magical storyline forward in a lot of ways, doesn't have much to say about the Others. And speaking of Bran (nice segue), I may or may not be back tomorrow with thoughts on his very first chapter, the image that popped into George R. R. Martin's head 22 years ago and counting, the true beginning of the story. I'm off to read it right now.