I am halfway through the first volume and enjoying it a lot. I have it on audiobook, which helps me get a bit further in the story every day, since I don’t have lots of time to read (two jobs and a baby). I do have the book, too, and read a few pages here and there in my “office.”
I like it a lot. It’s a great middle-brow entertainment – good guys that are fun to root for, bad guys that are fun to hate, a couple of ambiguous ones, battles, intrigues, and wolves. Fucking wolves. I wish I had a dire wolf! My whole life would have been different if I had Ghost. Sigh.
Looking at Amazon.com reviews, opinions are mixed from when, if ever, the series peters out. I have one friend who’s read the first four books four times each and loves the fifth one, which just came out. I reckon he’ll be right with GRRM until the last page or he drops dead. Others say only Game of Thrones is good, and I’ve seen every opinion in between.
I am an impatient reader but think these books have that “gotta find out what happens next,” thing that will keep me going for a while. And I feel like I’ll read 100 volumes if I need to, just to see Cersei disembowled by Lyra’s wolf for what she did to Lady.
I’m in the same camp as your friend and have enjoyed everything so far. However the general consensus seems to be the first three are great (with 3, A Storm of Swords being chock full of crowning moments of awesome) and four & five have dropped away somewhat.
So I’d recommend you read the next two and then try number four (A Feast for Crows) but be prepared for a big shift in pacing from that point on. If you don’t like 4 you won’t like the latest one in my opinion.
The thing you have to understand is that the complaints about the series aren’t really about a failure of intrigue. They’re about a failure of, I don’t know, consummation. If you’re reading straight through them, you’ll probably have some favorite and some less favorite parts (some say 2 and 3 are great, then downhill, some say 2 is good and 3 is better) but I doubt you’ll stop wanting to know what’s going to happen. You’ll probably keep wanting to know what’s going to happen, and then finish the massive 4th and 5th volumes and realize that you still want to know pretty much everything you wanted to know when you started 2.
The trouble for long-time readers is that it takes Martin so damn long to finish each one, and then that - avoiding spoilers - when the last few new ones have come out after long months and years of waiting, they haven’t really resolved as much as people were hoping for. A lot of people have hated the last couple stylistically, too, but I think generally speaking the main problem most people are having is that these books aren’t tying up loose ends. Reading straight through, you won’t have the problem of waiting 5 years only to read 1,000 more pages that don’t answer your questions, but there’s still the danger you’ll end up where the rest of us are.
You’ll at least read through part of Feast. If you were to poll the entire fandom, the consensus would definitely be:
Storm of Swords
Game of Thrones
Clash of Kings
Dance with Dragons
Feast of Crows
With a large drop off between Clash and Dance, so I can’t see you stopping before you finish Storm. George had some real problems with his big plan, which become evident past that point. That’s when people might quit. That or after a 5 year delay in books.
Well, the problems GRRM has is that a) he’s a little *too *fond of killing off his characters, so that by the fifth book most of the protagonists left are barely more than children, which he himself admitted he hadn’t anticipated as he thought events would take longer to unfold, leaving them time to grow and b) because of his constant shift of focus between something like a dozen viewpoint characters, not all of which are going to be doing anything interesting at any given time, some of their chapters are going to feel like annoying padding. No, George, nobody gives a damn what Daenerys is doing right just this minute. When come back, bring giant dragonborne Dothraki invasion.
If you really gotta know what happens and you don’t mind waiting and waiting and waiting, then you’ll make it all the way. It’s not that Feast and Dance were bad books, they’re quite good, it’s just that we’re waiting for some of the subplots to payoff. I will buy the next book, whenever it comes out, so I’m still very much on board.
Even when the series peters out it is still miles above anything else. It mostly means it is not as good as the first few books. From where you are now the books keep getting better up until book three anyways, and they don’t fall very far from there either.
You do really have to be invested in the story in order to keep up, especially once you get past GoT. There are So. Freaking. Many. Characters that it’s impossible to keep up with them all. There are names floating around in my head that, even after a dozen rereads of the first few, I couldn’t tell you who they are. Addam Marbrand? I know he exists, but have no idea who he’s attached to. Is it important? Not really, but, as wonderful as the series is, and as much as I would love to recommend it to everyone, everywhere, it really is NOT a series for everyone. Especially a casual reader.
One big problem the series has is that nothing could possibly make the waits worthwhile. You wait 5-6 years for a book and your expectations will be sky high.
My copy of Feast For Crows is sitting where it’s been for several months with a bookmark about three quarters of the way through, and I have no great urge to pick it up again. This is after racing through everything up to that point (yes, I’m a latecomer to the series). I doubt I’ll read any more of the series until it’s completed, if that ever happens, and reports suggest that it does have a reasonably satisfactory ending.
The biggest problem for me with it is that I have no-one left to care for, as the majority of the sympathetic characters have died alone, in great agony, and I suspect that the same will happen to the few I still care for.
