Blame Kate.

Firstly, Caitlin is absolutely to blame for my reading this series.  She thought I'd like it & so ordered the first book through the Library for me.  As we were deep in rehearsals at the time & I was fresh out of reading material I actually read it.

Like is not a word to use with this series.  Frustrating, maybe. Ick; definitely.  It has a high ick factor.  Innovative?  Hardly.  Actually if I had to choose one word Soap would describe it very well.  No wonder they made it into a T.V series!

So why am I about to finish up the second book & begin the third?

It has it's good points, if you skip the sordid & unnecessary sex, the gratuitous violence & the blatant take of of Medieval Europe.  Actually Medieval Europe is more interesting ~ & that's not a period I'm overly enamoured of.   It is extremely predictable.  Don't get attached; Everybody dies.  Oh, the good points.  Right.

You don't need to read all of it ~ or even most of it.  It can be read as about 3 separate books:  The Night Watch; Danerys; & the epic battle between the Lannisters & the Starks ~ & in point of fact this is how I have taken to reading them because otherwise this is a highly annoying series.  Why?  Because it is not only large & unwieldy, it is inconsistent.  It purports to be fantasy then reads like a blood & guts epic ~ until you come to Danerys & her dragons.  *sigh*  Seriously?

Unfortunately Martin writes reasonably well, if not brilliantly, & has a knack of being able to suck his readers in to a world that is neither engaging nor compelling but be warned; he is a lazy writer who can't be bothered to tie up his loose ends, plug his plot holes or deal genuinely with character development.  So much easier to simply kill them all off ~ which he does at a truly alarming rate.  I guess winner takes all.  My money is on Danerys.

Everyone compares fantasy writers [unually unfavourably] with Tolkien.  Frankly Tolkien needed a better editor & in this Tolkien & Martin share commonality.  More is not necessarily better.  Martin should read Garner to get an idea of how to do this really, really well. So despite the 7~ 800 pages each of these books manages to consume I am wallowing through them ate a great rate of knots.  There's just so much that doesn't need to be there & happily can be discarded with little lose of comprehension as the entire theme of Game of Thrones seems to be chaos ~ both in fantasy & reality.