Best Of

I'm in the camp that if I had the option to start with the show, I would, but I've already spent so much time reading the books I feel like I have to finish.

Haven't touched the books. I've really enjoyed the show.

As for the multi-arc stuff, here's the thing:

It starts with Tolkien. He wasn't the first to include multiple character arcs in one long story, but he certainly popularized the form for modern fantasy writers. Like any other trend in art, it's been taken out to the point that what modern practitioners are doing doesn't quite look the same at a glance, if you haven't been watching the intermediary steps, but most epic-sized fantasy stories now follow this ring-quest format, rather than the oddysee style story about one character who has lots of shit to do. Even many novel-sized fantasy stories now use this type of story telling.

Generally, the characters all begin in one place (like the Council of Elrond) and end in mostly one place (those who survive) and spend the middle of the story variously departing from and rejoining one another to keep them connected. If you read a random sequence from the middle of the Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't make any sense (as opposed to reading a random adventure in the middle of the Odyssey, which is still coherent).

Now Martin's work is much longer than LotR, and at the point you dropped in, the characters have been apart for a long time, and are running their own shit separately, but they still, mostly, all were in the same place at the beginning of the first book. One major line (Daenerys) was introduced as distant, but connected through other characters later, and some lines (Stannis, Brienne) are branches of other character's stories that began at the beginning of one of the other books, but it still follow. The Song of Ice and Fire is a particularly convoluted tale, and so even more difficult to pick up in the middle than LotR ever would be, but it's not really a "challenge" if you watch/read from the beginning (I actually recommend you watch, rather than read, but it's not a popular opinion)

@Cliff_Forster said:
After watching the Game of Thrones season opener last night, with little knowledge of the mythology beyond some episodes and back story my wife has given me, I have to be honest, what does anyone see in this?

It doesn't have a plot. This is a massive interwoven story of hundreds of individuals in a massive power struggle in a complex, living, breathing world.

You cannot grasp it by jumping in to any given point. The story is about the people in it, not what they're doing.