"A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms", "Wuthering Heights", and Making America Read Again

HBO’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” concluded its freshman season this month, capping off one of — if not, recency bias aside — the best debut seasons I’ve ever seen.

Adapted from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire universe novella The Hedge Knight, Season 1 tells the story of Ser Duncan the Tall, a knight-for-hire with more honor than coin, and his chance encounter with a sharp-eyed bald boy called “Egg” — short for Aegon. What unfolds is a friendship that feels small and personal at first, but quietly lays the groundwork for events that will ripple across an entire kingdom.

The series was blisteringly hilarious, fiendishly clever and, at times, surprisingly emotional. It managed the rare trick of satisfying the ravenous online fandom — try opening Twitter or TikTok without running into a dozen hype edits of the season’s climactic trial or the occasional thirst-trap tribute to one of the show’s many gallant heroes — while also winning over more casual viewers. Each of the six episodes averaged roughly 24 million viewers globally, with numbers still climbing.

According to industry outlets like Deadline Hollywood and The Hollywood Reporter, the show’s performance was so strong that it significantly boosted first-quarter results for Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company. The timing certainly helped: the series premiered in January, well ahead of the studio’s first major film release of the year, Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell.

What fascinates me most, though, isn’t just the ratings or the quarterly earnings. It’s what the show did to books.

Following the premiere, Martin’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms collection — which gathers the three “Dunk & Egg” novellas — shot up bestseller charts online. Even more surprising, reading activity for A Game of Thrones, the thousand-page novel that launched the franchise, reportedly jumped from roughly 800 new Goodreads adds to nearly 4,000 in January alone.

Those numbers may seem like trivia in another era. But in a time when fewer people are reading for pleasure than ever before, it’s genuinely encouraging to see audiences diving not just into lighter, trend-driven titles, but into sprawling fantasy epics and even 19th-century classics like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. There’s nothing wrong with escapist romance or beach reads — but it’s refreshing to watch dense, demanding stories find a new generation of readers because a television series trusted its audience to keep up.

Season 2 of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already filming, and viewers eager to return to Westeros won’t have to wait long, with House of the Dragon also slated to return to HBO and HBO Max in the coming months.

Until then, if you’re feeling the itch to spend more time in Martin’s world, the entire A Song of Ice and Fire catalog is waiting on the shelves at your local library.

Yes — including the Blackwell Public Library.