Of Kingdoms and Thrones

I have never been so interested in a series since The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sure there was Harry Potter but despite the great reviews and the movies, I just couldn't will myself enough to purchase one of the books and was contented with waiting for the next movie and reading about the reviews. The reviews gave me an idea of how faithful the movies were with the books and I was convinced the movies were enough for me. It was quite different with the LOTR where I had read the books and other works of Tolkien prior to the production of the films. I even wondered when they were going to do a film version of The Hobbit (its now being produced) and imagined how The Silmarillion could be adapted into a film. The latter is an epic that would require, I think, a series considering the wealth of stories that can be derived from the book. In fact, some publishers have come up with what I thought was a conscious attempt to break up The Silmarillion into a few books and make it look as if they were independent of the original work.

The first time I learned about A Song of Ice and Fire was through friends who posted about their excitement about the first book, A Game of Thrones, being adapted for a series with HBO. The result, as they say, is history and I got my first glimpse of the series with the Clairvoyant one late night in our Singapore home as we did our scan of cable channels while lounging in our living room. We were both impressed at the production and excited and anticipated for the next episodes of the series. When the series ended, we both exclaimed "bitin!" And rightfully so considering it has captured our imagination especially after the dragons hatched in the season finale. 

A Song of Ice and Fire is actually a series of novels that includes the following, so far:

A Game of Thrones
A Clash of Kings
A Storm of Swords
A Feast for Crows
A Dance with Dragons
The Winds of Winter
A Dream of Spring

The last two books are still to be released but are highly anticipated considering the sudden popularity of the books and the boost created further by the HBO series. My only regret is how I only came to know about the books when the first one was published back in 1996! Nevertheless, it is never too late to try to catch up on my reading considering I would really prefer indulging myself with such literature to balance my constant diet of material pertaining to my chosen profession. I think the Clairvoyant would agree with me that we need to get copies of the novels so we can feast our minds on the certain pleasure of digesting these books.