Some random morning, 2010: I wake up on a couch with a splitting headache after about 5 hours of sleep. My mind instantly reverts to my default plan of attack in such situations: 'You are to commence immediately in dumping an obscene amount of coffee down our gullet and finding a bagel by any means necessary'. Aye-aye, brain.
I recall now that my friends and I had hit it hard the night prior and I had been too drunk to drive home. The sun blares with gusto through the front window of their apartment. It's summer-time, or maybe late spring? I don't remember. It doesn't matter.
I drag my feet over to the kitchen to prep the coffee maker when one of my buddies exits his bedroom and shuffles off to the bathroom, looking as shitty as I feel. I hear the toilet flush and he exits a moment later. I spare a longing thought for my own toothbrush, miles away at my own place. My friend's eyes are glued to his phone the whole way over (presumably to a text message—we had very few fancy apps ten years back). He reaches blindly for an upside-down mug. Finally he looks up at me and speaks the first words of the day:
"Hey, have you ever heard of Game of Thrones?" He asks.
"Wharrght!" I barely caught what he said. My brain's going to take a few minutes to warm up, and several hours to get back to functioning at peak capacity. I'm experienced in dealing with this situation and I know not to push the organ too hard, too early.
"New fantasy series HBO is doing. It's in development. My brother is really excited for it, he's obsessed with the books. He keeps texting me news about casting and all this other crap. He won't shut up about it."
I would go on to buy A Game of Thrones shortly after this conversation occurred to see what all the fuss was about. Amazon was already a thing, after all, even back then.
—
I was fortunate enough to read A Game of Thrones prior to the release of its television adaptation. I was able to explore it with no prior notions of what kind of a writer George R.R. Martin was. I didn't expect anybody to die terribly. All I knew was that it was fantasy, and hey, I liked the Lord of the Rings movies, right? So why not give this a shot since it comes so highly recommended?
I think this way of falling into A Song of Ice and Fire is exceedingly rare to the folks approaching this series now since it's discussed in pretty much every avenue of pop culture, be it nightly talk shows or water cooler discussions in the office.
I mean, it really is everywhere. A few years ago I was in Spain, walking along the beach after dinner, and I saw Jon Snow's moody face staring at me (below).
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| A random Jon Snow sighting in southern Spain |
I pity that so many people will lack the unreal experience of having their expectations completely shattered by this book. It's almost impossible to come into it blind unless you've been living under a rock for the past 8 years.
It's hard to discuss A Game of Thrones in a vacuum without considering how much of a pop culture icon it is. But in strict terms of its craft, I think what's perhaps most impressive about this book is how expertly Martin drip-feeds us his worldbuilding and characters. Not once did I feel that I was overwhelmed with too much information, though this did happen to me in the beginning of A Clash of Kings, which I felt dragged terribly as it introduces new characters and picks up the pieces of the devastating conclusion of A Game of Thrones. But its predecessor suffers nothing like that, which is an astounding feat considering just how much exposition is thrown at us in similar first novels of fantasy series. The world slowly reveals itself to you, becoming more and more enticing along the way. And you grow to like most of these characters immediately, because they feel like real people.
The only archetypes that really exist here are those Martin puts in place specifically to tear down. Sometimes it seems like this book exists as a challenge to the most popular sorts of fantasy that has existed, and, indeed, still exists, like stuff written by Brandon Sanderson, for example. It's as if Martin has taken existing characters from other fantasy stories and placed them in a realistic feudal society. We see at the conclusion of this novel what happens when the upright, uncompromisingly moralistic, ne'er-do-poor Eddard Stark comes face to face with the political machinations of real world feudalism, where absolute power is free to be had by whomever is most adept at grasping for it. I have the distinct memory of reading the scene in which Eddard is executed and simply refusing to believe it actually happened. "No way, no how. Arya didn't actually see him die, right? It had to have been a double or something." I was in such disbelief that he was actually executed. Surely Martin expected his readers to have this reaction, because he dangles right in front of your freaking eyes exactly what would have happened in other books: Cersei states that Eddard will be allowed to take the black and join his bastard son Jon at the wall, presumably to redeem himself at sometime later in the story and set things right again. "What a nice story development! I see where this is going!" But nope, he gets killed. Right there, suddenly, on the whim of one sporadic decision by Joffrey. It's such a wonderfully realistic twist in the story, yet it's devastating and impossible to anticipate.
As a former history undergrad, the plot of ASOIAF reminds me perhaps most of reading actual history, with all its convolutedness, rather than any other fictional genre—even fantasy, the one to which it technically belongs. Eddard's execution created such regret of what could have been, and the later novels in ASOIAF are filled with stuff exactly like it. It's what could have happened after Augustus' death if Germanicus had not died and instead survived to heroically take the purple. It's the knowledge that could have been preserved had the Library of Alexandria not burned to the ground. It's the glory of golden age Baghdad—the height of medicine and education around the globe in the 13th century—had the Mongols not sacked the city, salted its earth, and filled in its irrigation canals. These are the kinds of grand tragedies that exist in history; tragedies that you feel in your gut, tragedies that make you sick to think about, and ASOIAF was the first time I've ever come close to experiencing this kind of visceral regret while reading fiction. It's able to accomplish this mainly with its worldbuilding (which makes the world actually feel like it's thousands of years old) and its phenomenal character writing.
I graduated college in 2007. I did so much reading—mostly of incredibly dry and boring histories—that I spent nearly three years without picking up more than a book or two. I was almost completely burned out on the act of reading itself and preferred to spend my free time playing video games or watching television. Reading A Game of Thrones was thus a bridge to me; a bridge which led me from history to fiction, and, in a more metaphorical sense, the first of many such bridges which led me to inhabiting the person I am today. It made reading "history" fun again, and opened up the entirely new world of fiction to me, which has immutably changed me for the better. Martin reminded me of what is so fantastic about reading fiction by writing characters that feel like real people and subverting the tropes of an entire genre.
I read maybe 3 books in 2009. I read 62 in 2019. I carry either a book or my e-reader everywhere with me. I listen to audiobooks when I drive, shower, or do the dishes. I spend nearly all of my free "me-time" reading. It's become my chief hobby, something I never thought possible after finishing college.
That's what George R.R. Martin did for me, and why this series is so important to me. George R.R. Martin made me a reader again.
—The apartment my three friends occupied nearly ten years ago is long gone. The building is still there, but that place is no more. Sometimes I still drive past it on my way elsewhere and remember that morning.
Now we're all in our thirties and fondly remember our wild-and-woolly nights out in our early twenties. Two of my friends are married. One has a child. One now lives across the country from us, in Texas. Sometimes a song or a smell hits me with a blast of nostalgia for that time in my life, and sometimes I see Martin's book series on my shelf and get hit with a similar feeling.
We may have gone our separate ways, but it's impossible not to think about them and that time when I reread this series and recall where I first heard of it and how it has changed the way I live on a daily basis. I can only hope future books I read will have some semblance of the impact that this one has had on my life.
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