this book only got good when it came to the epilogue very annoying!!! patiently awaiting the winds of winter ( )

Best book in the series, perhaps. Only bad thing about it is that I'll have to wait a couple of years for so many cliffhangers to be resolved. ( )

Good lord, these books are long. I have spent what feels like (and probably was) months with this series. Reading them straight through is one hell of a commitment. My brian is to tired to form anything coherent about the series right now. They are good. If you like books with characters that are complicated as fuck and will force you to care about them, pick these books up. Maybe read a light, happy, short novel in between them however. ( )

This one took me a very long time to read, I was constantly picking up other books between the - very long - chapters.

Tyrion still on witty form, Arya trains to become no-one, and Cersei has to do her walk of shame.

I had actually thought this was the last in series (rather than the latest published so kept wondering how Martin was going to wrap everything up with just a few pages left. And, of course, he doesn’t.

Still an amazing achievement of a complex and diverse world with well-drawn characters. And 5000+ pages later I still want to know who will win the game of thrones. ( )

← Part 6

I made it across the road without incident, which was more than could be said for the previously unmentioned guy who looked just like me and who tried to cross the road at the same time. He had an incident.

“Huh,” I mused, “if I'd dwelt too much on the fact that I thought I'd seen myself having a violent altercation with a moving car then, upon my sudden travel back in time, me not having a violent altercation with a moving car would be a quaint but kind of obvious little trick to play on the reader. I mean on... uh, yeah.” I stopped musing at that point, I was getting funny looks.

Spotting a horse cantering out of a nearby popular coffee shop, I grabbed its reins, hopped aboard, and guided it to a brisk trot down the road. I felt like I had an immediate rapport with the horse, indeed, I could almost hear it whispering to me, things like “What the hell do you think you're doing?” and “Someone get this madman off me! I only came out for a coffee!” I patted my new steed on the head and decided to while away the hours by talking to him. “You see, Derek,” I began, having decided to call my horse Derek. Again I felt like I could almost hear him talking back as a voice drifted to me on the breeze saying “My name's Susan.”

“You see, Susan,” I began, having decided to call my horse Susan, “the problem is that these Song of Ice and Fire books are pretty good throughout, but they've developed a reputation now for having big, shocking endings. So now it feels like GRR writes the book then fiddles with the chapter order so that you've got five hundred pages of solid but not outstanding fantasy, and then twenty pages of frantically awesome plot twists that leave you both utterly desperate for the next book and also with a slightly inflated opinion of the novel as a whole.”

“I know what you mean,” said Susan, “I actually thought–”

“Quiet, Susan, you're a horse,” I said, shoving a bag of oats beneath my noble steeds mouth, and relieving her of the grandé caramel macchiato clutched in her hoof. And with that we rode into the sunset (figuratively speaking, Susan wasn't a space horse with suicidal tendencies) ready for The Winds of Winter; because they may be formulaic fantasy, predictable in their unpredictability, but dammit I can't get enough.

Part 8 (coming 2016) → ( )