i am a man of regiments and rituals. a few rules related to this review:

1. i only watch a television show if it has a full season in the can and the next one is underway. reason being i don't like the cliff-hangers typical in season finales. so for an active show, i will watch a whole season in immediate sequence, like on dvd, and at the last show, immediately roll into the next season, just watching enough episodes, usually two to three to resolve the previous season finale's suspense-laced storyline and then i stop. of course, this only applies to shows actively being produced and not ones that are fully run and done).
   
   
2. if i see a movie if being made of a book i want to read i rush to (a) buy the book before it gets its actor-posed movie cover and (b) attempt to read the book before the movie press starts. the rigidity in which i enforce this is proportional to how much i want to read the book. the more i want to read it, the faster i am to act. the reason behind this approach is that (a) i find movie book jackets lame and thoughtless and (b) i don't like having the story's characters pre-defined in my mind's eye. there's only so many personas tom hanks, or leonardo dicaprio, or russel crowe should be allowed to portray.
   
   
3. i try to avoid reading the same author twice in one year. the reason behind this is for authors i super enjoy, i fear exhausting their catalogs too rapidly, thus depleting my ability to experience them anew anymore. while i'm just as inclined to binge as the next person, i force myself to be patient to milk new material as long as possible.
   
   
4. although, my consistency in this wavers (i'm now currently back on track) i attempt to read books in a defined genre-based rotation. this has changed over the years but the current pattern is this.
   
   

   POPULAR FICTION	(e.g. ken follet, dan brown, john grisham)
   CLASSIC LITERATURE	(e.g. alexandre dumas, victor hugo)
   SCI-FI/FANTASY	(e.g. isaac asimov, orson scott card)
   MODERN LITERATURE	(e.g. upton sinclair, william faulkner)
   INSTRUCTIONAL	(e.g. typically recommendation-based)
   CLASSIC LITERATURE	(e.g. charles dickens, vladimir nabakov)
   NON-FICTION	(e.g. michael lewis, jon krakauer, bill bryson)
   MODERN LITERATURE	(e.g. gabriel garcia marquez, theodore dreiser)

   
   the purpose of this is rut and glut avoidance. i am desperate to not become a boorish one-category reader and i also love (!!!) the sweeping arcs of subject matter landscapes this forces my mind to ambulate through.

the above rules are needed for book review because all four of the tenets were challenged by this book. last month i was in north carolina visiting my two best friends. their monikers, curiously, are bookpimp and bookguy, although that is, surprisingly, completely unrelated to this story about books. while visiting bookpimp (as i stayed with them separately) he mentioned this new hbo show he was watching. he said it was rife with unexpected and curious happenings and he found it most entertaining. at his suggestion i watched the first few episodes, three to be exact.

now since it is an active show in the midst of its first season, it was in conflict with rule 1. since the show was unusually good out of the gate, i knew this was going to prove problematic. wanting to see the sort of longevity the show might have i looked into where the story came from and found there was a line of books, five to be exact, fueling the series. in looking into the books, i found the fans of this particular author were nothing less than rabid for his words, calling him a modern-day tolkien. while it gave me hope for the series, it now put it in conflict with rule 2 (even though i didn't know i was breaking rule 2 when i began).

figuring i would take control back and stop the bleeding i stopped watching the show and bought the first book of the series. i made three immediate observations about it:

1. it was crazily identical to hbo's series. i don't think i've ever seen something translated so perfectly (the next best thing may be the porting of the UK version of the office to the US version of the office - although i still contend that the one you prefer depends on the one you saw first). scenes and dialog are portrayed near verbatim, missing none.
   
   
2. given the convoluted, and often similar, kooky names for things, i would have been lost trying to keep things and places straight. having watched the show i already had faces to names. i was also able to download and print a visual family tree of the players and houses which i kept folded up in the book in the early chapters to help me keep the diorama in check. due to an amazing job of casting done by the hbo team, having faces pre-stamped to names was surprisingly not annoying and allowed me to easily lose myself the story being told instead of fighting the fantastical language.
   
   
3. the story was masterfully good. and i tore through it's 900 pages at a surprising clip. as i got near the end and the storyline was popping in multiple threads i lamented to marty how i was sad it was ending. surprised, she said i thought it was a series. i said it was but referred her to rules 3 and 4. without hesitation and with a great judgmental inflection she said, "i suggest you live a little troy and read that second book. i mean, go wild. tear it up. they'll never see you coming."

and you know what i did. i got wild and read that second book. well i got wild and started that second book at least. and like when i watch television shows, i got through the cliff-hangers, and once i did i lost my cavalier spirit and reason returned. i put a bookmark in book two at page 150 and returned it to the shelf, trading it for the next one in my scheduled rotation, a tom wolfe selection and one i've been anticipating since i read his last (there's that bristling newness i work to protect).

so in short, this book was entertaining enough to make someone as regimented as myself leave the comfort of my well-defined and hard-held routines to taste just a little more. 150 pages more to be exact. and i'm confident the rest of book two, scheduled to come up in rotation sometime in 2012, is not going to disappoint.