This was my second time reading the book, but this time I opted to listen to the audio rather than read the physical pages (Roy Dotice does a phenomenal job of narrating. No annoying voices for women, all the accents he does use feel real and lived in for the world, and he will speak with exertion and sigh and sob when the characters speaking does).

Despite that, I was still completely enraptured. I already knew all the betrayals, deaths, paths, blood spilled, but I still gasped and cried and smiled with joy as if it was my first time reading it.

Sometimes when a thing gets so popular, it becomes easy to start finding the flaws. "It can't be THAT good, right? There must be something wrong about it." I can honestly say, to me, Game Of Thrones defies that. Even with the dark and heavy themes, the book (not the show mind you) treats them as exactly that, not fetishism and shock. I don't know how it manages it.

A worthy 5 star, so many years later.