Rhapsodies

Well as everyone else is counting the hours til Sunday’s premier of season 3 of Game of Thrones this Sunday I have my own treat I finally got the audiobook for A  Feast For Crows from the Library.

It took me a little while for me to get into Game of Thrones… (Yes I know the actual name is A Song of Ice and Fire but thanks to HBO it will always be Game of Thrones) Most of this can be blamed on me doing most of my recreational reading these days through audiobooks and unfortunately some books lend themselves to this format then others.  The main reason for me is that in a regular book you can increase the speed of your reading. You can linger on the interesting bits and more importantly you can gloss through the bad stuff as quickly as possible (and let’s be honest with ourselves, Game of Thrones has lots of bad stuff.) You can’t do this with an audiobook (well you can but it’s not precise and unless you have the actual times written down you miss more than the bit you want to miss) Therefore everything occurs at the same pace which means you have to go through things like the fate of Ned Stark and the Red Wedding at the the same excruciating pace as all of the stuff you enjoy. Because of this I lost interest after the third hour of the recording.

However for the most part I knew my initial disinterest had nothing to do with the quality of the material and most of my friends told me I should give it a second chance and I did… after I watched the first season on HBO.

Now I’m totally geeking out over it.

It’s funny, normally I’m one of those really annoying critics who insists on being familiar with the original material before he watches an adaptation so that he can judge it as an adaptation as well as a work in its own right. I’m finding reading the book after I watched the show I’m finding it fascinating to see all of the choices and sacrifices the creators made in order to turn all of this text into a show that works.

But back to the audiobook.

One thing I’m enjoying is that for all practical purposes Roy Dotrice‘s reading counts as a different and separate performance from the HBO production. As an example let’s compare his Tyrion Lannister with Peter Dinklage‘s… Dinklage (and make no mistake this is one of my favorite performances in the whole show) play’s Tyrion as bent but definitely not broken, pretty much the embodiment of the following quote.

When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.”

Dotrice reads Tyrion with a  sarcastic high pitched voice in what I’m pretty sure is a Welsh accent. You can almost imagine him with a permanent sneer. This is an angry little man whose terrible life has left him bitter with the discomfort he causes in other people one of his main sources of satisfaction.

The rest of his interpretations on the rest of the cast are equally different and fascinating.

So since I don’t get HBO and I’m still waiting to get my copy of the second season I have the fun of finding out what happens next in the book.