A Game of Thrones

How it began

Game of Thrones came to our television sets in 2011. I was busy moving from Turkey back to the US. I had not read a single fantasy book in my life voluntarily. My husband made me read a few novels about Drizzt, but I did that more out of wifely duty than any kind of enjoyment. I was a romance reader and nothing would convince me to change. Over the years, I heard “Winter is Coming”, and I heard some weirdly pronounced names that meant nothing to me. I then made a conscious decision to NEVER become one of the fans who love Game of Thrones. I mean, I had never watched Avatar for that same reason, I wasn’t going to succumb to peer pressure that easily.

The middle years

From 2011-2019, I managed to live in the US, then Spain, and then back to the US and still never see a single episode of the tv series. THEN in 2021, I decided maybe I should stop reading only romance and branch out a bit. I had consistently read about 250 romance books a year and I wondered what else was out there that I was missing. I liked fantasy romance and romantic suspense, so what if I tried just fantasy or just suspense. How would I feel about those? Well, it turned out that I loved them. I made another conscious decision to never say no to a genre until I had at least tried it.

2023

In the middle of 2022, I was telling Jolien that I hadn’t read any of A Song of Ice and Fire and I hadn’t seen the series either and she suggested that I read the whole thing in 2023. I had to find out what everyone has been talking about and what I’ve been missing for all of these years. So, here I am. With just under 2 years of fantasy reading experience under my belt, I’m ready to tackle the Game of Thrones!

*(I’ve still never seen Avatar though)

What’s next?

I’ll be doing updates here as I read through the series. Probably checking in every 100 pages or so. There will definitely be spoilers, so if you don’t want to see spoilers, maybe don’t follow along anymore, but seriously, if you don’t want spoilers, how did you make it this far into this article to begin with? I’ll also have reading updates in video format on my YouTube channel, so be sure to check that out as well.