Yo. I’m launching a new series, as you can probably tell by that giant banner above.

Starting very soon, I’ll be reading George R.R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire for the first time and posting my opinions and reactions up here. I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to make a post for every chapter or not, since it seems like this book series has a buttload of them. This first post is little more than a heads-up.

First, to get something out of the way: this series of mine is blatantly inspired by Mark Reads. A while ago I found the guy’s blind read-through of Harry Potter, fell in love with this whole idea of sharing your first-time reading experiences with the Internet, and since then I’ve fantasized about trying my own hand at this thing. But I had an obvious problem: what would I read? I already know Harry Potter, and I already know Lord of the Rings.

But I don’t know A Song of Ice and Fire, nor have I seen the wildly popular HBO adaptation. I’ll be starting with the first book, A Game of Thrones, and I’m going into it almost completely blind.

Mark has a recurring system where he’ll start a read-through by making some predictions about where the story will go — but since I lack context and don’t really know what to expect, I’ll just explain what I’ve heard through Pop Cultural Osmosis instead:

• I know there’s a character named Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean in the TV show, and I know that he dies at some point (because Sean Bean’s characters always die). Yeah, I understand this could be considered some kind of big deal — and it’s obviously supposed to be a spoiler — however, it’s still devoid of context for me: I don’t know how he dies, when he dies, where he dies or why he dies. I just know this character will kick the bucket at some point in these books. (Probably early on, since I haven’t seen Sean Bean in any of the recent TV promos.)
• I know a few other character names, but once again I have no context for them, just a few actors’ faces.
• I’ve heard this series starts pretty grounded and/or low fantasy, but changes gears at some point into straight-up high fantasy. So, just like Robin Hobb’s books, then.
• I know the books are getting a potentially terrible MMO made with Unity3D, but that’s neither here nor there, I guess. I just like to bring up Unity3D absolutely any time I possibly can.

And that’s about it. I may have read a few other interesting things regarding the books or the show, but if so, I’ve forgotten them by now.

I have yet to decide how often I’ll post my summaries and reactions. Once a day for every chapter? What if there are simply too many chapters? What if the chapters are really short or super long? What if I hate the book and want to stop reading entirely? At the beginning of all this I’ll be playing it by ear, but I hope to settle into a routine as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading — we’ll see if this becomes a thing.

NEXT