I am thoroughly enjoying A Game of Thrones, a book recommended to me by two of my friends who have pretty good taste in books. Say, have you ever noticed how you know whether or not your friends have good taste in movies but you don't know as much about their taste in books? Anyway. This book is pretty awesome so far. It's gimongous, somewhere around 800 pages...and perhaps even more daunting, it's the first in a six book series where all the books are of similar length. But you know a book is good if you're getting genuinely aggravated at some of the characters and sincerely disappointed when they die. Which is coming to be a common disappointment...Jesse told me not to get attached to any characters but I didn't expect his words to ring this true. And any book which can make me take a character named "Ned" seriously and actually admire him is a winner in my world.