| Chunli said: I love watching Game Of Thrones. Is it worth reading the Game of Thrones book by R.R Martin? Theres a bookstore near my place selling the set of 5 books for about 69 AUD only. |
Again, I'd highly recommend them. I got the set after the first season of Thrones, and went through all of them very quickly. I expected a lot of the attraction to Martin was due to his characters and the machiavellian, complex nature of his plots, but his writing style is excellent and extremely readable--far better than I was expecting. I suppose for some people his descriptions of violence and food might be on the verbose side, but I had no problem with it.
He's attached some realism to a fantasy world, particularly the medieval kind of realism so absent from centuries of literature, and really absent in the kind of neo-Tolkienian fantasy that became prevalent in the sixties through eighties: Martin however, depicts the paradox of noble knights slaughtering innocents, of kings in castles living next to peasants in hovels, and the kind of amoral political manouvering that dominated European societies for centures, resulting in brutal conflicts like the War of the Roses here in Britain. That being said, one of the key themes of the book is the return of magic to the world. It's not massively explicit, because the political schemes and personal dramas of the characters are the focus in Martin's texts, but it's obviously there.
But yeah, like I said, I highly recommend them. You get a huge amount of brilliantly crafted, well-written material for your money, and it really fleshes out the television show.
