I read the books first, but couldn't get in to them. It was almost a year before I reading another shot, and after that I was hooked. Also, I accidentally ended up at a George R. R. Martin panel at comic con and that was cool.
Something just dawned on me. You know how we went from two digit years to four digit years because of the Y2K bug? In like 9K years we'll have to go to 5 digit years to combat the problem again