Here's the deal, I am not a huge scifi guy, but do enjoy some of it, GoT series being one of them I enjoy. I have heard the books and the series are really close to each other. I really want to read it, but would it be boring to me given that I already saw season 1?
I'm kind of on the fence about reading it too. I downloaded a sample on my Nook and, for whatever reason, the dialogue is really hard for me to follow in written form. I just don't do well with medieval fantasy slang. I mean, I could probably plod through it for a while until I got the hang of it, but I want to know if it's worth it since I plan on watching the show religiously anyway.
FWIW, pretty much all the reviews I read about this said that it takes a while to get used to this, but that once you do it goes easy. Prob similar to reading a Dickens novel.
Well, my second fear is that I tend to have an addictive personality. When I find something that interests me, it pretty much consumes me. I'll rifle through a good book in 2 days and virtually abandon my family only stopping to sleep periodically. It happens with video games too. It was so bad that I would play Ghost Recon on my laptop in the middle of class in law school, and the original CODMW almost ended my marriage.
The rave reviews of this series coupled with the sheer length and number of volumes may ruin my life.
A couple of things....
First, it takes about seven or eight chapters before you get a handle on Martin's writing style. I bought the GoT book a few months before the series started to get ahead of the TV show. I read two or three chapters and put it down and figured I was just out five bucks. Then the show came on, I loved it, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. So I pushed through, and after a while, it was really, really easy to follow. So, all of those complaints are valid. However, like you guys, most complaints may just be people who don't care for fantasy writing because I forced myself to get through Lord of the Rings because I absolutely HATE Tolkien and his writing style. HATE. True, visceral hatred. Martin, however, is really, really good once you get used to it. The man knows how to write a battle scene.
Second, each volume, depending on what format you buy it in, is anywhere between 800-1200 pages. GoT was one of the shorter ones. Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords (the best one) were over a thousand pages. A Feast for Crows (Book 4) was around 800, and it...crawllllled. It was a companion piece to get the boring stuff out of the way so A Dance With Dragons (Book 5) would be great, which it is. However, ADWD is about 1200 pages, and it's taken me a while to get through it. I read a hundred pages, put it down for a few weeks, read another hundred, put it down, etc. However, there were nights when reading books 2 and 3 that I would stay up until 3 or 4 AM reading because I couldn't put it down. The end of Book 2 was amazing, which is why I can't wait to see this season, because if it's half as good as it was in the book, it will be some of the best television you've ever seen.