And does he have to describe in detail every single meal that they eat and every single outfit that they wear? She’s a queen and he’s a soldier, I just assume she’s going to be dressed in a nice gown and he’s going to be wearing armor, and if something about the outfit is relevant that’s fine but otherwise why go into detail about her dress being “a fire orange velvet lined with sable and slashed with gold”, or that the meal begins with figs soaked in honey, then has a salad of greens and carrots and pearl onions followed by a course of duck stuffed with oysters and baked in mare’s milk after being poached over an olive wood fire on a Thursday by a woman who breathed on it after swirling her mouth with pomegranate juice etc. etc. or whatever.
The way Martin kills off his protagonists was ‘refreshing’ (for want of a better word) at first. Having read through the fourth book, it’s starting to feel like a gimmick. He probably thinks his schtick is clever, but it’s coming to the point of parody.
I’ll finish the series, though.
I quit after the second book, not because I didn’t like it, but because I was starting to wonder if he can keep up his pace of releasing these books about every other year.
Turns out I was right. The time gap became too huge.
I’ll read the series when he finished it…if he ever does.
It is? That was the one that finally turned me off the series for good.
Ok, so it’s not unanimous. But I’d say a good majority of fans of the series rank A Storm of Swords as the best. It’s probably the one that actually moves the plot along the most. The Red Wedding is a pretty memorable scene whether you enjoyed it or not.
I haven’t found Martin’s writing to be unbearable, but I wll admit that ADWD featured way more table top gaming than I ever cared to read about.
UM he is totally milking it…every con, trade show, book signing he goes to, he gets an “apperance fee” or “speaking fee” and he does 2 or 3 ever month…so in the 6 years it took him to write the last book he would have done close to 150 of these. Each time fans show up it encourages him to do more of these and spend less time actually writing the next book… It is the fans fault, if you are a GRRM fan, PLEASE DO NOT SEE HIM LIVE…maybe he will learn we want the next story, not 6 years of you telling us about the proccess of writing the next story
The OP made the right decision. GRRM has lost what talent he once possessed. Reading for fun shouldn’t be a chore, and that’s what ASoIaF is.
Go read somebody fun and upbeat, like Tolstoy.
Also, it is just a fantasy series. If I’m going to read 10,000 pages (or whatever the final total will be) on any one subject, I pretty much expect to be able to speak Chinese by the end of the effort.
One of the podcast I usually listen is “On Point”. They did an interview with GRRM and he read the part where Tyrion is eating cheese.
Don´t get me wrong. It was one of the best cheese reading description ever. I almost felt that it was I, not Tyrion, who was eating that orgasmic piece of fermented milk (see? I am trying to imitate GRRM).
But I didn’t give a fuck about the cheese. Sadly I listen to the interview after reading a Dance with Dragons, because after that last book I also don´t give a fuck about Tyrion and GRRM.
Someone should conduct a study about sci-fi hacks and their editors.
Me too. I felt like that’s where his killing off major characters went from “refreshing” to “fetish.”
I think he’s a living, breathing, walking example of short-attention-span theatre, and he’s severely over-extended himself now.
His novels are OK, I guess, but nothing like the quality of his short works. (Including his work writing in and editing Wild Cards. Well, until he got bored with it.) Then he somehow managed to kick out two really good installments and one quite excellent one of A Song of Ice and Fire. Then in eleven years (ELEVEN YEARS!) he’s managed to put out two mediocre (at best) 1200 page collections of words.
I have no great hopes for the next one, and won’t buy it unless a reading of the library book shows it to be worth throwing more money at him.
If you’d kept reading, you’d find that his killing off of major characters has turned into “I’m not dead!” cheap tricks. At least he hasn’t brought Ned back.
My gave up on them for two reasons:
One, there’s a difference between tragic and pathetic, or shocking. I love tragedy. I love an author who can write tragedy. GRRM can’t.
Also, I really got sick of 95% of the female characters being either insane psychopaths or total pathetic victims who may, if they are lucky, be eventually driven into insane psychopathy.
Finally, the violence, especially the sexual violence, really became gratuitous. I’m not a squeamish person. I don’t object to vivid description. But it needs to have a point, and preferably a point more sophisticated than “this guy is a really, really bad guy. Like totally evil”.
He’s not only old, he’s fat. And he’s not only old and fat, but he was hospitalized with some ailment last year.
At one book per five years, I don’t think there’s much chance of him finishing the series, even if he knew how to do it.
I read FfC from the library, and didn’t bother to buy it when it came out in paperback. And I decided that I probably wouldn’t buy any more of the series. I’ve quit caring about the story. What’s worse, I think that GRRM has quit caring about the story.
I love fantasy, and I enjoy several fantasy series. But this series seems to be dead, even though it’s not finished.
I read in some magazine (I think Entertainment Weekly) that Martin loathes fan fiction and has tried to stop it, a position he shares with Anne Rice among others. While I understand why they don’t endorse any fan fiction or even read any (most of it blows zorses and even so it can always lead to later claims of plagiarism) I was surprised he was so passionate about it; I truly doubt anybody’s going to mistake GothBlogGirl92’s work for his after all.
I’m getting the impression that if I can slog through however many pages of I, II, and III, that’s a good stopping point.
Yeah I gave up too, after reading the Amazon reviews and finding out the last two books are absurdly tedious. And the worst part is apparently GRRM is getting old and might be too old to actually finish the series and tie everything together. The first two books were so awesome too, maybe he’ll realize his brain is wrinkling and write a couple thrilling last books to actually finish things up.
If it’s a slog, you probably shouldn’t read them at all.
I just finished A Feast For Crows and it wasn’t that bad. At least, it wouldn’t be that bad if I thought that it was the middle of a story that was going to finish some day. But considering the story might terminate abruptly at any time…
Even though I was disappointed with ADWD, I will read the other two books remaining In the series. I may have lost some interest in the whole series during the time it took for him to release FFC and DWD but I still would like to know how it all ends.
It’s a bit like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Some books in the series may have been disappointing, but the overall journey was most satisfactory. I hope GRRM picks up the pace after two place-holding novels and finishes with a flourish.