I Both Enjoyed and Hated A Game of Thrones: So You Can Argue with Me No Matter What!

This is so terribly written and full of cliches that it makes my brain drip out my ear as I read it. AND YET I CAN'T STOP. I might even start the next book. That's why I'm settling on three stars. I can see why it would make good TV: that's just like what so much TV is like--compelling, addictive, offensive, and insulting to one's intelligence.

Maybe even more to the point, it makes perfect sense that Martin was a TV writer before he settled down to this big honking set of two-dimensional characters being manhandled by a plot written in magic marker in between pointless lengthy action sequences, in a world full of sexist, racist, and classist cliches so obvious that there's not really any point in dissecting them. Everything's floating on the surface.

I can only attribute my enjoyment of it to my growing intellectual laziness as I get old, tired, addled, overworked, mommy-brained, addicted to the new media, and unable concentrate for very long on actual good books. It's sad, really. I really shouldn't read any more. But I probably will. I kind of want to see if he's going to get the dragons to burn up the zombies. But we probably don't get to that level get until after a several more mini-bosses. Right? Wait, don't tell me.

For the record, I have nothing against fantasy. Not a dedicated fantasy reader or anything, but I adore Pullman, for instance, enjoy Guy Gavriel Kay, and actually found it worthwhile to suffer through all the appendices of LOR.

But man, this book.

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