reread it after the show ruined my life and it is better than I remembered, mostly

right so I did the thing where you go back to the book after the show finished and everyone told me not to because it would just make me sad, and they were wrong, it was brilliant, it was like getting the good version handed back to you.

the thing that hits differently now is how SMALL it is. the whole thing is basically a domestic drama about a family that moves house badly. there is one fantasy sequence at the start with the white walkers and then essentially nothing supernatural happens for the entire rest of it until right at the end. as a person who reads fantasy specifically for the magic systems that should annoy me and it does not annoy me even slightly, because the politics is doing the same job. every conversation has a cost. every alliance is a resource you are spending.

which brings me to the thing I always say and everyone in my Discord is sick of, which is that this book is Crusader Kings. it is. the POV structure is you switching between characters who all have partial information and none of whom can see the board, and the reader has more of the board than any of them, and that is the entire engine of the dread. you know what Littlefinger is doing; Ned does not. you sit there watching a man walk into a room he should not walk into.

ok minor spoiler but everyone knows this one already — I am not going to be careful about it. the Ned thing. here is my take. Ned is not stupid. Ned is playing an entirely different game, one where honour is a strategy that has worked his whole life because he lives in the north where everyone else is also playing it, and he takes it south and it does not translate. that is a really specific and clever thing to build a book around.

actually no. I take that back. I have argued myself out of it while typing. Ned IS a bit stupid. he tells the woman his plan. he tells HER, out loud, in a room, on purpose, having been warned by two separate people. I love him but come on mate.

characters. I always say Arya is the best written and I think I say that because she is the most fun, which is not the same thing. Sansa is the one who is properly written. I hated her when I was seventeen and I was reading her exactly the way the book wanted me to and then feeling smug about it, and coming back to her now, she is a child who has been taught one story about the world and is watching it be disassembled in front of her. that is horrible. that is the actual horror of the book and it is not the beheading. Catelyn is up there too, the chapter where she catches the blade, first read I thought that was just a cool moment and now I think it is the best character introduction in the series.

Bran gets pushed out of a window in something like chapter two which is an absolutely psychotic thing to do that early and I respect it enormously.

Dany's chapters I skipped as a teenager because I wanted swords and I was an idiot. they are the best structured arc in the book. she is the only person in the whole thing who ends up further along than she started.

the food descriptions are great and I will not hear otherwise. everyone does the joke about the food. the food is doing work, you can tell exactly how rich a room is by what is on the table in it, it is the cheapest and most effective worldbuilding tool available and he uses it constantly.

nine not ten. two reasons. one, the prologue and the ending point at a story about ice and horror that this book then does not tell, and knowing what I know about how long we have been waiting, that structural promise now reads slightly differently. two, the chapter headings being just names means the opening stretch of any reread is me going hang on, which one is this?

and look, I said in my group chat about eighteen months ago that I had stopped waiting for the next book and it had made me enjoy these ones more, purely on their own terms, as a finished thing.

that was a lie. I checked the blog last Tuesday. I check it most Tuesdays. I am fine.