A Game of Thrones

I tried reading this before the HBO series came out, and found it a hard slog. It's incredibly slow to start, and there are so many different characters to keep track of it's hard to bond with any of them. Embarrassingly, I had to watch the series before I tried this one again, but it was much better once I had an idea what the hell was going on - and the rest of the books were so much better! Three stars for getting me into the series and for general competence.