Incest and intrigue, and six-page descriptions of every last meal

Ah feck, I swore I wouldn't do it. I swore I wouldn't read A Song of Ice and Fire - not least because of articles like this. But it turns out that watching HBO's Game of Thrones is just a gateway drug to the hard stuff. Especially when your goddamn husband turns up with the paperback and plunks it in your hands.

It's a soap opera really - stuff constantly happens, but nothing fundamentally changes. There's no actual plot-arc visible. But you can't look away.

A man is both hot and incredibly creepyI am trying to watch the TV version first, and thus take it slowly. It also helps, actually, because it brings the eight hundred bickering characters on each page to more vivid life. So I'm reading the 2nd book now and hoping to placate my TOTAL OBSESSION with DVD extras and stuff until Series 3 airs next year.

I've started taking sneaky looks ahead online too. (This is a baaaaaaaad idea.) The differences between the books and the TV versions fascinate me - the choices made to make some characters older, to bring in the big guns instead of using sidekicks, the decision to write extra scenes fleshing out some characters, which actually makes it clear that some NEVER have the story told from their point of view...

Of course, all this should not blind me to the deeper moral issues involved: