Reading along with 'A Clash of Kings' and season two of 'A Game of Thrones' will be fairly challenging, but each week I'll let you (as spoiler-free as possible) know how far ahead you will have needed to read to stay just ahead of the series.

I have got to be honest: I expected a much bigger backlash from fans of A Song of Ice and Fire to last week’s episode because of the mounting changes. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have; “Garden of Bones” was easily the best episode so far in this early season; fans responded to its quality rather than picking it apart for what it didn’t show — and what it did.

Unfortunately, this week marks the end of the advance screeners that HBO has sent out. Unless they decide to send out more, this will be the last Read Along post that I’ll be able to post in advance of the episode airing. I ask you, gentle-readers, are these post still valuable after the fact? Keith and I suspect that there are folks in the future that will be reading the books as they watch the series on HBOGo or on DVD.

A reminder on the purpose of these posts: the goal is to make these posts as spoiler-free as possible, just sharing information on which chapter you’d have to read to stay ahead of the show. Also, I’ll be leaning on Tower of the Hand, a great reference for fans of ASOIF and Game of Thrones – their spoiler filters are ingenious – as a touchstone for which chapter I’m referring to.

For the fourth episode, “Garden of Bones” one would need to have read through Chapter 43: Davos II. As with last week, there are as many scenes that are “new” as there are direct correlations to chapters/scenes in the books. Even stating this particular chapter as the checkpoint is a bit misleading. There is an event in Chapter 43 that is shown in tonight’s episode, but it doesn’t fall into the same sequence as it does in the books (A statement I hope was opaque enough, though I suspect anyone familiar enough will be able to suss out my code).

Photo Credit: HBO