(Note, in case some of this doesn’t make sense in the future, this post was written on September 25 2022)
I did it. I got caught up on the Game of Thrones.
I don’t think many of my thoughts changed between one book and the other, but that being said I did not bother to go read my previous reviews to find out what I had previously written. I am not sure that I care. What is written below is mostly relevant to this last reading.
I have always held the belief that writers of prominence are given a separate set of rules to play with. If some nobody submitted a book that does the same things that this one does, it would be rejected. Justifiably so. Martin gets away with it because he is an established name. You really see that here with all the flaws of this novel. Martin has a structuring problem, and what he tried to do between this book and the previous one just didnt work for me. The idea, initially, was that he would focus on just certain characters in the previous book and then focus on the other characters in this one. I don’t think this worked. There were time issues, and in this book I ever seemed to understand what other characters were doing when someone else’s actions were going on. It felt confused. The fact that Martin starts to include these other characters towards the end of this book suggested that the idea didn’t work even for him.
But there was a bigger issue in this book. There was a lot of water in this broth. The painstaking detail is starting to wear on me. Some of the details and additional story threads are fine, others I just don’t care about. The cast has become unwieldy. I found myself askinf whether I knew this character or not, and if so from where. Were they mentioned in the previous book, or did they just come to prominence now and I am supposed to remember a throw away line about them from two books ago?
These books aren’t great. There is better reading out there. But I am invested. Right now the question boils down to will I live long enough to read the next book, and who will be writing the one after that, Martin or Brandon Sanderson?
Only time will tell.
Failures in Polymathy 