Fantasy - George R.R. Martin - A Dance with Dragons (2011)

Jesus, I am terrible at this write-the-review-when-you-finish-the-book shit. Fuck. Anyway.

I picked this up the same time I did A Feast for Crows, but just didn't get off my ass to read it until now. Now I'm all caught up on Mr. Martin's Song, and now I understand a little better how the HBO show is going to handle it.

It's hard to talk about this book because even the mention of certain characters may result in spoilers, depending on what book of this series you're on or how far into the show you are. But, how Feast was about half of the characters, this book is primarily about the other half of the characters: what is going on with them concurrently with the events in Feast and their own reactions to events from that book. But that all goes out the window at about the halfway point of this titanic tome. At that point, the two spreads have met back up and you begin to see characters from the other book pop up more as they becoming interspersed with the characters this book was purported to focus on. So you will see a Jaime chapter. You will see some Cersei. And you will see some [REDACTED].

Damn it George, why did you have to make it seem like so many characters are dead while others are actually dead? You make it difficult to talk about your work without bringing down the wrath of the internets.

The moral of most of this story is that if the economy has been gutted for whatever reason, shit gets fucked real quick.

I can't even really tell you whether or not you should read it or buy it though. This being Book 5, you either are dedicated to the series at this point, or it's not what you want, or you feel it's too long to get into now.

8.5/10

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Fantasy - George R.R. Martin - A Feast for Crows (2005)

Obligatory haven't-posted-in-a-while blah blah blah.

I know I'm probably the last person on earth to read this installment in the landmark Song of Ice and Fire series, but I had gotten the first three books all together, so it took a while for me to get off my ass and read this one. Several years, in fact. Long enough for me to have forgotten most of the events of the previous books and be depending on the TV show to remind me of some of the shit that went down.

Without further ado, A Feast for Crows.

In the back, Mr. Martin informs us that to cut down on book size, he made an executive decision and gave us all the story for half of the characters in this book, and would do the other half later. Personally, I think that the readers would have been better served by having this information at the front of the book. Not because then readers would skip this book or whatever, but because they wouldn't have to flip through while looking for a Dany or Tyrion chapter to find this out. After all, this book is focused primarily on the southern reaches of Westeros, primarily the King's Landing machinations of the Lannisters. Cersei and Jaime are here in abundance, and their personalities and dynamism really shines in this book.

That being said, a lot of the content in this book felt like filler. I understand the need for all of it; the climax would not have worked out if we didn't have the rest of the book preceding it. But filler, no matter how tasty, is still filler. And because of that, I can't say that this is the best book in the series. Maybe A Dance with Dragons will be better.

Also, how are they going to handle that "all the story for half the characters" shit for the TV show? :/

7.5/10

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Buy it @ Barnes & Noble.