AGoT Read-Along: A Peek Inside the Mind of Sansa

I'm still working on transcribing all the panels and stuff from Phoenix Comicon last weekend, so only one chapter up this week!

“No, no, stop it, stop it both of you. You’re spoiling it, you’re spoiling everything!”

Sansa 1

Scene opens on Sansa having breakfast at an inn with her septa (nun/governess lady), and sneaking bacon to her direwolf Lady, who is very sweet and well-behaved. Sansa and Arya are supposed to be riding with Queen Cersei and Princess Myrcella in the wheelhouse today, and Sansa is very excited about tea, lemon cakes, and the possibility of seeing Prince Joffrey (not necessarily in that order). Arya is not at breakfast with them, so Septa Mordane sends Sansa to find her and make sure she’s acceptable to be admitted to the queen’s presence.

She finds Arya on the banks of the Trident (a convergence of rivers in the shape of, well, I’m sure you can guess), brushing mud out of her direwolf Nymeria’s fur. She tells Arya she needs to get dressed up for the royal wheelhouse ride, and Arya states she’s not going. She’s going to go search the river for the rubies Robert whacked off of Prince Rhaegar’s armor when he killed him at the Trident back during the rebellion. Additionally, she doesn’t want to go in the wheelhouse because it doesn’t have windows and you can’t see anything as you’re traveling. Sansa can’t believe her sister would rather go treasure hunting than ride with the princess and queen. And she has a point: it’s probably not very polite to reject a royal invitation. And yet, Arya also has a point: who wants to ride in a stuffy box without windows, with no Dramamine in sight?

AGoT Read-Along: An early morning ride, a road trip, and an assassination attempt, a.k.a. Eddard 2, Tyrion 2, and Catelyn 3

After a two-week hiatus from the read-along, we are back! It took an epic newbie round of the Game of Thrones board game to convince me to get back to it. The game was awesome. Some friends and I decided to dedicate a Saturday to it, because it looked like a really confusing version of Risk set in Westeros. Which is pretty much what it is, but it is great fun! We started at 2 p.m. and finished at 8 p.m., with only string cheese and cheez-its to sustain us. Damn those supply lines!!! Anyway, it was really fun and I recommend it, but patience is definitely needed the first time you try it out (and probably the second and third, too). But I digress! Time to return to the business at hand, which this week is Eddard 2, Tyrion 2, and Catelyn 3. Let’s dive in!

Eddard 2

Ned and company are on the Kingsroad heading south to King’s Landing. It’s the wee hours of the morning when Ned is awoken to go on a cold ride with King Robert, who apparently suffers from insomnia. The purpose of this ride is ostensibly because Robert wants to ride around like a wild man and remember his younger days when he didn’t have the responsibilities of a king, but rather seems to be for Ned and Robert to chat and elucidate back story for the readers. Points of interest:

• Robert prods Ned about his bastard’s mother. Ned names a commoner woman called Wylla as Jon’s mother, and refuses to speak anymore on the topic. (That’s twice now he’s refused to discuss the subject with people he esteems! First with Catelyn, and now with Robert. Hm.)

Read-Along: AGoT chapters Tyrion 1, Jon 2, and Daenerys 2.

And we keep on truckin' in the read-along! Susan has found herself buried under a veritable avalanche of library books and has tabled her A Game of Thrones reading for now, but hopefully she will rejoin us soon with some savvy insights and snark! This week we read Tyrion 1, Jon 2, and Dany 2. Join us!

Tyrion 1

Our first Tyrion POV, yay! Not a very long chapter, but it serves to move the plot along a bit. Tyrion has pulled an all-nighter reading in Winterfell’s library, and now that dawn has come he heads out in search of breakfast. He comes upon his nephew Joffrey and the Hound in the courtyard. The ever-sensitive Joffrey doesn’t see why he should go tell Lord and Lady Stark that he’s sorry their son fell out a window and broke his back, so Tyrion provides some instruction, punctuated by a brisk slap across the face. And another. Readers rejoice!

Tyrion then joins his siblings Cersei and Jaime, along with the royal children, for breakfast. Here as well Bran is the hot topic of conversation. Little Tommen and Myrcella appear to (thankfully) not be cut from the same cloth as their brother Joffrey, and express the more conventional thought that they hope Bran doesn’t die. Pretty much all the adults Tyrion has encountered so far this morning seem to think it would be more merciful to kill the comatose boy and be done with it, however. When Tyrion reveals that the maester thinks Bran will live, he notices a glance pass between Cersei and Jaime. Hm…

Read-Along: In which Ned comes to a tough decision and two Stark children don't listen to their adults.

Here we are with another week's batch of AGoT chapters! Wonder what hijinks our friends and frenemies will get up to in Catelyn 2, Arya 1, and Bran 2...

Catelyn 2

Catelyn and Ned just had sex, and are now going to ruin the evening with an argument. Catelyn is thinking about how cool Winterfell is, with hot spring water running through its walls so it’s always toasty and the bath water is always warm, when Ned goes and opens the windows and lets all the cold air in. Uh oh, nothing good comes from brooding out the window into the cold darkness…

Ned doesn’t want to go south and be the Hand of the King for Robert. He says when he refuses Robert will be upset for a while and then get over it, but Catelyn disagrees. She says Robert has changed and will see such a refusal as a) possible plotting against him, and b) an affront to his pride. Ned must not refuse these honors!

Read-Along: It's a twofer, it's a twofer!

(You have to imagine that in the voice of the panicked farmhand at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz.) We had 6 chapters ready for posting yesterday, but decided to nip it down to 3 so it wouldn't be (as much of) a beast of a post. So here are the next 3, and it's not even Saturday yet! Check out Daenerys 1, Eddard 1, and Jon 1 after the jump.

Read-Along: A Song of Ice and Fire

Hello, bookworms and moths! Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend. We have been working hard to bring you our latest project--a read-along! We've seen them on other blogs, and it looked kind of fun, so we thought we'd give it a try. Susan just started reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, and as Alyssa was looking for a good excuse to re-read the series, it was decided that this would be a fun option for a read-along, especially since it is so zeitgeist-y at the moment. We plan to post chapter-by-chapter summaries, followed by our individual takes on the chapters, aiming for at least 3 chapters per week, posted on Saturdays. We thought it might be interesting to see the perspective of a book newbie (Susan) *and* the retrospective perspective of someone who has already finished out the current 5 books (Alyssa). There will be spoilers for the chapters we are summarizing and commenting on (duh), but any spoilers for later books will spoiler-tagged so you won't see them unless you want to.

Full Disclosure: Alyssa got hooked on the TV show first, and then gobbled down the books. She really enjoys the show, but she really enjoys the books, too. If you put a gun to her head she would pick the books over the show, but does not consider herself to be a crazy book purist when it comes to the TV show adaptation.
Susan read the first two chapters of Song of Ice and Fire in February during a bitter cold spell, and was put off by its length. A few weeks later she watched two episodes of season 2 with a friend, and became hooked. She's made it up to episode 107 (and the 6% mark on the book) rapidly after that.

So without further ado...

Prologue

We open on a scene of three men of the Night’s Watch, ranging beyond the Wall. Ser Waymar Royce, a young lord from the South, commands the ranging, although he has had the least experience of the three—Gared is an old man by Westerosi standards and has spent most of his life at the Wall, and our POV character Will has been there for 4 years.