Wow. And I thought A Clash of Kings was rough going. This… was a slog. (Warning: there will be spoilers for books 1-4, or roughly seasons 1-4 of the show, but none for this particular book.) I could write, here, a plot summary, itself a thousand pages long, of how we ended up here and some of the precise things that happened in A Dance with Dragons, but when I really sit back to think, “What happened?” in this book, I am frankly not sure. […]
If I never read the word Greyjoy again, it will be too soon.
Last year, my kids did the swim team at our pool. That meant I had HOURS of time for reading, just sitting pool-side, and I got through the first three GOT books. This year, one kid had a broken arm and we also ended up going away for a month. This meant very little time for me to dedicate to George Martin. But I did manage to plod my way through book 4 (and jeez, I just picked up book 5. WHEN AM I EVER […]
I’m a nice man.
Rogues was my second George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois themed anthology in less than six months, and I’m happy to say I enjoyed it more overall than their previous effort, Dangerous Women. (I will pick up Warriors eventually. Maybe next year. I’m soooo done with anthologies for now.) And I’m sad to say, especially for how good Martin is at writing lady characters, I really think the main difference is that a lot of genre writers (including women!) just could not fathom how to write a […]
Like sands in the hourglass, these are the Games of our Thrones …
Both book and television spoilers lurk within … A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in George R. R. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, was published in 2011, after a five-year gap between it and the previous entry, A Feast for Crows. The series started with A Game of Thrones in 1996. The series has had an interesting evolution. Originally intended to be a trilogy, Martin soon realized that his fictional world of Westeros and beyond was expanding and would require first, four, than six, now […]
Words are wind.
Well, here we are. By “here,” I mean the part of the books where the book readers all say GRRM’s editor settled in for a nice, long nap and hasn’t since reappeared. (Except she apparently does exist, and is awake, and is somehow okay with the idea of an eighth book?) Spoilers for the prior three books obviously follow. Given the grumbling over this book and its successor, I liked A Feast for Crows more than I expected to. Yes, certain words and phrases are repeated […]
Now I can be a Smug Book Reader too.
And I’ve finally caught up to Season 3 of HBO’s series and, according to the showrunners, informed most of what’s going to happen in Season 4. Who gleefully anticipated the Purple Wedding, y’all? THIS GAL! There are possibly spoilers in the rest of the review, though I’ve tried not to refer to anything too specific. Without a doubt, A Storm of Swords was my favorite so far of the ASOIAF series. Where, in the past, I frequently felt torn away from my favorite characters to […]