I slacked off and didn’t actually finish the book. However, @dmfarley did, so he’s writing our only review for today.

From @dmfarley:

It took me a while to jump on this bandwagon. Hell, it took me a while to jump back on the bookwagon. You may notice, I don’t participate in these book discussions much. I don’t read nearly as much as I used to. Maybe it was the grad school, maybe it was the fact that I have this sort of OCD where I must read every word on the page which makes for slow going. But man, this book got me going again. I read it in 10 days. I actually just finished the third book. That’s over 2700 pages in just about 3 months. That’s a helluva thing for me.

But enough about me.

So, yes. I really dig this series. And this book. Clearly, what kept me reading page after page was the story. This is a great soap opera that just keeps you on the edge, staying up way later than you should because you have to work in the morning BUT YOU JUST CAN’T PUT IT DOWN! Mostly. I mean, yeah, there are some stretches where it starts to drag. But, for me, just when it started to bug me, the dragging pace… well it just picked right back up again.

I have noticed some oddities about Martin’s writing. Like how he seems to get fixated on a word or concept. Like he just thought of how torches will “gutter” when wind hits them and then he seems to mention one doing just that on every page for a stretch. And he also seems to have a bit of the Ayn Rand syndrome of saying something in 1000 pages when you could have said it in 10. There is a lot of “catching up” that goes on when we switch to another character-perspective chapter, mentioning a bunch of shit we already know. It’s as if all these chapters were released as Readers’ Digest serials at one point, and this is just the later-released complete anthology. Which, incidentally, has helped teach me to glaze over text some times.

Also, characters you grow really fond of, dying, totally sucks! Three books in and I’m still not used to it.