Re-reading Song of Ice and Fire

I think it’s about time I explain the lack of updates on this blog. After all it has been over a month now.

The reason I suddenly stopped writing (and reading!) is because suddenly my priorities in life changed. My wife is pregnant! I know that this doesn’t mean that world is coming to a stop, but it made me re-evaluate what I want to do in life and forced me to drop some of the things I did. World of Warcraft landed on shelf as did this blog, which I’m really sorry to admit. With the changes I have to prepare for I will only have time for one crazy internet project and that will have to be Fantasy Fan.

I hope that when things become less crazy I’ll manage to finish reading SOIAF in peace and lay my hands on A Dance With Dragons and HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation. Some day I also hope to come back to writing this blog. I can’t say when it’s going to happen though. Right now I have more important things to worry about.

I’m going to be a father!

It took close to three months, but the first book of Song of Ice and Fire was re-read and covered on this blog. Hope you liked it. I enjoyed it immensely. Covering the book on pages of this blog let me understand and appreciate the book better than before.

I’m really looking forward to reading next books. In my previous attempts to re-read the whole series I often failed to go through all the books, which resulted in knowing the first book really well and the follow ups not that well. The deeper I go into the series, the closer I come to “reading it for the first time”. I’m sure it’s going to be interesting.

If you enjoy following my experience with SoIaF feel free to leave a comment, or even better, share it with your friends! Nothing motivates me more than knowing that someone finds my work valuable.

Now, on to A Clash Of Kings!

May is a busy month for me. Family visits and my own travelling robbed me of the time to read and write alike. I also don’t want to rush the re-read at this point in the book because we’re getting to the most intensive part of the first tome. It would be a great shame to not give them proper coverage and commentary. I’m working on those chapters right now, so bear with me!

After some serious thinking and after people suggested this to me I decided to change the way I deliver the re-read. Instead of throwing chunks of 5 reviews at one time I will go chapter after chapter, echa one in separate update. This will be a bit more difficult for me to manage (five times as difficult in fact ), but it makes much more sense and it will be MUCH better for the readers (you will be able to pick a character tag and go through only his/her chapters or quotes), so that settles it.

I’m not going to re-invent the wheel here. The concept of re-reading the book/series is not new, so I’ll just borrow from experiences of other reviewers. Each article is going to be divided into one chapter blocks, in which I will try to cover what happened in the chapter, my commentary and some of the best quotes (if I find any).

I will try to stick to the main events in the summary, Song of Ice and Fire is quite long, the whole point of this exercise is to bring you up to speed with what’s important, besides I really don’t see a point in writing things like “and then Arya went to the kitchen”. I will also try to refrain from speculating, my commentary is going to be mostly focused on what I did like in the chapter and what peaked my interest. Also, I’m not going to try to spoon feed you my interpretation of the book, I’ll try to keep the commentary short and relating to facts rather than digesting “the exquisite brilliance of the Winterfell castle description”.

If you have not read the entire series (up to the Feast for Crows) at any point in time be warned that there WILL be spoilers. The reviews are written mainly for the people, who have read the books, and want to refresh the memory. If you have not read the books or maybe read just one and want to skip to the new one, this is NOT the advised way. If you insist on reading it anyway, please don’t complain if you don’t understand something. I may take some things for granted and assume people will know what I’m talking about.

If I get something wrong (I admit it may happen, although I will put every effort not to), please point it out either in comments under the blog post or on the Fantasy Fan’s Song of Ice and Fire forum. Be polite and constructive though, I have a low tolerance for trolls.