In the Game of Thrones, You Annotate or You Die

?I feel pretty safe in saying that most of us here enjoy George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, whether it be the books or the HBO show. It’s a rich world filled with complex characters and an epic tale which eschews traditional genre storytelling. But man, it is complex — I’m not ashamed to say there are so many characters, major and minor, so many families and cities and shit going on that I’ve often had to look things up on Westeros.org to refresh my memory while reading.

Which is why I’m incredibly delighted to tell you The Annotated Game of Thrones is now available, at least on your iPad! It’s via a free app called Subtext, which allows people to add notes to ebooks. Before you think this is some Wikipedia anybody-off-the-street endeavor, I should say this is an official annotation commissioned by Random House, done by ASoIaF editor Anne Groell, my pal and occasional TR contributor Sean T. Collins (who writes incredibly insightful thoughts on the books at his site Boiled Leather, as well as posting awesome Game of Thrones fan art) and Elio Garcia, the webmaster of Westeros.org (he’s the dude George R.R. Martin calls when he’s forgotten something about the world of his books. Seriously). Together, they’ve created more than 1,000 annotations for A Game of Thrones, and plans are underway to do the rest of the books. And for those of you who don’t have an iPad, don’t worry — Subtext is currently working on a web version so everyone will get to enjoy it. For more info, check out the post at Westeros.