What can I say? I went large on a fantasy series complete with knights and dragons and some ridiculous 'olde worlde' spelling and phrases. One of the things any favourable opinion of these books has to overcome is Martin's habit of making names genre-appropriate by replacing vowels with a y (Lysa, Petyr, Myrcella etc etc). But in spite of all this, I read thousands of pages more or less back to back and got completely obsessed.

It is easy to see why this has got the HBO treatment - long enough to really make its own world, polyphonic and containing more moral ambiguity than I could easily cope with.