Reading A Song of Ice and Fire With Someone
Tandem reads are one of those things that sound great in theory and fall apart in practice unless you set expectations before page one. I've done probably a dozen of them across different book series, and the ones that actually work share a few structural things in common. The Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas is a particularly tricky case for tandem reading, and most people approach it with the wrong assumptions going in. Here is the basic mechanic. Two people read the same book on their own schedule, then meet up to discuss. That's it on paper. In practice, the friction points are where everything breaks. The most common failure mode is one person reading significantly ahead of the other. This is not a problem you solve with good intentions. It is a problem you solve with a protocol. Throne of Glass has seven main books plus the prequel novella Crown of Midnight, which some people count as book two depending on which edition they're using. That numbering confusion alone will cause more arguments than the content ever will. Before you start, agree on which chronology matters. The publication order is: Throne of Glass, Crown of Midnight, A Court of Thorns and Roses does not belong here, House of Earth and Blood is a completely different series, Court of Wings and Ruin same, Queen of Shadows, Empress of Dreams, Kingdom of Ash, A Court of Frost and Starlight, A Court of Silver Flames. Those last two are ACOTAR series books that casual readers mix up constantly because the character Cassian appears in both. Do not let that happen to your read.
The real issue with Throne of Glass specifically is the tonal whiplash between books. Book one is YA fantasy in the traditional sense. By book five you are reading something closer to adult grimdark with political maneuvering and body horror. If you and your partner have different tolerances for that shift, you will hit a wall around book three and neither of you will understand why the other suddenly seems bored or irritated. I encountered a specific edge case once where my reading partner and I were about six months apart on pages because they were reading significantly faster. Standard advice is to sync up before discussing, but what actually works is to establish a waiting period. When one person finishes, they do not discuss a single scene until the other has reached it. This feels restrictive at first. It prevents the spoiled experience from contaminating the slower reader. After the first two books of any tandem read, you should have a standing rule about what happens when one person finishes early. Spoiler-free activities like watching the author's interviews or reading fan maps works. Discussing plot events does not. Another thing people get wrong about tandem reads is the assumption that equal pace matters more than equal commitment. Two people can read at completely different speeds and still have a functional tandem read if they both show up for the discussion. The alternative creates worse outcomes. One person reads fast and dominates the conversation while the other reads slow and zones out. I've seen this happen in book clubs and it destroys the dynamic faster than any scheduling conflict.
The format that actually survives long-term across a seven-book series involves three structural decisions made before the first page. First, you pick a discussion frequency. Weekly works for fast readers. Biweekly is more realistic for people with demanding schedules. Monthly guarantees that you will forget details and the whole point evaporates. Second, you choose a discussion format. Voice messages, video calls, or live reading sessions each have different overhead. I found that live read-along sessions where you literally read together at the same time with voice chat running produce the best retention but require both people to have open weekends. Asynchronous discussion through shared documents or Discord threads scales better across busy schedules but requires disciplined participation from both sides. Third, and this is the part nobody mentions, you need a cancellation policy. Life happens. People get sick, overwhelmed, or lose interest. If your tandem read has no fallback for when one person drops out, it dies immediately. The workaround is simple. Agree upfront that either person can pause the tandem without explanation and resume within thirty days without penalty. After thirty days, you either restart together or acknowledge that the tandem is over and continue solo. Most people consider this a failure. It is not. It is how you prevent one bad month from costing you six months of accumulated reading investment. Throne of Glass has a particular narrative structure that makes it harder for tandem reads than most series. The first three books follow Celie's pov almost exclusively. Book four introduces new point of view characters. Book six splits between multiple Povs. If your partner loses interest during the Celie-heavy early books, you will not discover that until you hit the structural shift in book four and realize they have been skimming or skipping entirely. The workaround is a brief check-in after each book where you verify the other person actually finished it and how they felt about it. Five minutes saves you from discovering at book six that your partner has no idea who Aelin is anymore.
Get the Full Details
There is also a pacing problem specific to this series that tandem reads expose. Book five, Empress of Dreams, is roughly four hundred and fifty pages of political maneuvering in a setting where very little physically happens for the first two hundred pages. Solo readers power through this. Tandem reading partners often stall out here because the discussion loses traction when there are no major plot events to process. The solution is to treat slower books differently. Schedule additional discussion sessions or extend the time between books during these stretches rather than maintaining a rigid pace that forces you to discuss content neither person is excited about. If you want a practical starting framework, here is what I recommend based on actual experience rather than theory. Use a shared spreadsheet tracking book number, chapter range, dates read, and discussion dates. Use a separate document for ongoing discussion notes so you can reference earlier conversations. Set a hard rule that you cannot mention anything beyond where your partner has read. Use spoiler tags in any text-based communication. Accept that you will disagree on characters and plot points, and that is normal. The goal is shared experience, not consensus. The method does not work for every pairing. Two people who read at fundamentally different speeds, one who reads for escape and the other for analysis, or either person who treats the discussion as optional rather than core to the format will all fail within the first two books. There is no workaround for those mismatches. The tandem read format simply requires compatible reading temperaments more than it requires compatible schedules. You can reschedule a call. You cannot reschedule a mismatched investment level.
Download links for companion materials like reading trackers and discussion prompts are available through various book community platforms, though I do not maintain a single official source. The important files are the chapter-by-chapter discussion questions and the character timeline that tracks the various Pov shifts across the series. Without the timeline document, you will lose track of which scenes in Kingdom of Ash are flashbacks versus present day, and that confusion will make discussion frustrating for everyone involved. The series takes approximately two hundred and eighty hours to read in its entirety across all seven books. A tandem read with discussion typically adds forty to sixty percent more time due to conversation, second reads of confusing passages, and the pacing adjustments required to keep both people aligned. Budget accordingly or plan to stretch the read across six to eight months rather than rushing through it in a single season. The slower approach yields better retention and more meaningful discussion regardless of which format you end up choosing.
