A Song of Ice and Fire (Book discussion)

[Belragga]

I really recommend the Malazan series. It's a lot more adult then most of the fantasy series mentioned here and has very compelling characters and story lines. Nothing better then a good Kruppe speech or a Karsa Orlong fight scene oh and the always drunk yet extremely capable Seargent Hellian and you cant forget Quick Ben's magely shenanigans. Anyway if you like fantasy series I can almost gurantee you'll enjoy it.

Also fuck ya for Dance of Dragons, its been far too long.

[Sylvrdragon]

I'm surprised to see the Night Angel series mentioned. I thought I was the only one that read it, lol. Overall, I thought the story was pretty straight forward and shounen-esque, but my god... the action scenes are just so well described that it's like they're playing out in my head in live-action.

I've gotten a lot of good Fantasy recommendations from this thread... I'm gonna have to pick up some of these next trip to the book store.

[Deftscythe]

If you want some easy fiction with fantasy elements that's thoroughly enjoyable, I recommend Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. It's how I got into fantasy and I still love the books.

[Cantih]

Going to toss in
Glen Cook's The Black Company series
Naomi Novik's Temeraire series

[Drunkenmonk]

amazon has a box set of the 1st 4 books coming out on the 23rd for $24, guess i'll try to plow through them before july

[Odesseiron]

Bought the first book today in Barnes & Noble. Didn't start reading yet though, hung out with friends all night. Looking forward to reading this!

[Sylvrdragon]

Bought the first book today in Barnes & Noble. Didn't start reading yet though, hung out with friends all night. Looking forward to reading this!

You're in for a treat. You should light some candles and maybe throw an extra comforter over your favorite reading chair. Perhaps put on some classical music in the background. You might also consider getting some special lady friend (or hire a hooker if need be) to rub your back while you read, and perhaps some other parts when the situation calls for it.

[Odesseiron]

Welp, I just finished book one last night. I guess it took about a week. I was reading it slowly at first, then towards the middle I just couldn't stop reading. I think I went through the last 400 pages in 2 nights. Some sad stuff happened :'[ Have to expect it with these kind of books though.

I went out today and picked up books 2 & 3. I've now watched all of those portrayal videos, and I have to say they pretty much nailed it with the casting choices. I can't wait now to see it on HBO. I just hope they do they pilot faithful to the book and then they go ahead and do whatever the fuck they want. It doesn't look that way, but neither did The Walking Dead when they first advertised it. My hopes are high though that they'll remain faithful.

[Bweigelt]

Welp, I just finished book one last night. I guess it took about a week. I was reading it slowly at first, then towards the middle I just couldn't stop reading. I think I went through the last 400 pages in 2 nights. Some sad stuff happened :'[ Have to expect it with these kind of books though.

I went out today and picked up books 2 & 3. I've now watched all of those portrayal videos, and I have to say they pretty much nailed it with the casting choices. I can't wait now to see it on HBO. I just hope they do they pilot faithful to the book and then they go ahead and do whatever the fuck they want. It doesn't look that way, but neither did The Walking Dead when they first advertised it. My hopes are high though that they'll remain faithful.

Well GRRM is really involved in this and is writing one episode per season so you can bet they will follow the source material very closely. Really the one major change they've made to this point (the ages of the children) is something GRRM has said he wished he had done in the first place.

[Odesseiron]

Well GRRM is really involved in this and is writing one episode per season so you can bet they will follow the source material very closely. Really the one major change they've made to this point (the ages of the children) is something GRRM has said he wished he had done in the first place.

Yeah, I can see why for a couple reasons. For one, it looks questionable for a character to be 14, and getting married pretty much against her will, and having a child. In a written format, I see it as fine. TV is another beast. Even if it is cable. Another way you can look at it is they probably won't have to replace actors that way. The way the book (the first one anyway, not sure if the others are similar) with sometimes weeks at a time passing between the chapters. The kids though (Arya, Sansa, etc.), if they grow can easily be explained that way, which is also kind of nice.

[Odesseiron]

I'm on the very beginning of book 3 (about <5 chapters in) for the first time. It seems pretty unanimous that book 4 is the weakest link. Is it bad? Or boring? What exactly is it's problem without going into spoilers? I'll admit Martin does like to kill characters, but I don't think he's killed an obscene amount of important characters.

Spoilers about some deaths

Spoiler: show

The death of Ned really shocked me though. I really wasn't expecting that at all, which is kind of the point I suppose. Drogo's death was kind of unexpected as well. But not as shocking as Ned's. Tyrell's and Luwin's were eh. Kind of expected and not as sudden as the other two. The minor character deaths don't get at me too much. Those are a dime a dozen. If Tyrion had died, that would have really irked me. Him being a little uglier is fine.

Also; I don't know about others, but some of Tyrion's lines make me literally laugh out loud.

[Qalbert]

Tyrion is da best. and one of the problems with 4 is that "4 and 5" was supposed to be a single book, but it would be one longass book so he decided to take half the characters and make it one book, 4, and the other half for 5.

[Penthesilea]

While 4 wasn't the best, I feel it acts as a nice segue to set up all the shit brewing. Then again i read it back in 07 or whenever it came out and haven't read it since.

[Bweigelt]

I'm on the very beginning of book 3 (about <5 chapters in) for the first time. It seems pretty unanimous that book 4 is the weakest link. Is it bad? Or boring? What exactly is it's problem without going into spoilers? I'll admit Martin does like to kill characters, but I don't think he's killed an obscene amount of important characters.

Spoilers about some deaths

Spoiler: show

The death of Ned really shocked me though. I really wasn't expecting that at all, which is kind of the point I suppose. Drogo's death was kind of unexpected as well. But not as shocking as Ned's. Tyrell's and Luwin's were eh. Kind of expected and not as sudden as the other two. The minor character deaths don't get at me too much. Those are a dime a dozen. If Tyrion had died, that would have really irked me. Him being a little uglier is fine.

Also; I don't know about others, but some of Tyrion's lines make me literally laugh out loud.

Book 4 isn't nearly as bad as some would have you believe, it just feels somewhat incomplete because as Qalbert said it's really just the first half of what was going to be book 4.

Considering the mess that is book four I think that we'll see a lot of diversions from the original storyline for the TV series. I am going to make an uneducated guess that it'll probably be 2.5-3 seasons a book.

No guesses needed. They are doing 1 season per book. For Books for and 5 I assume they will split the books chronologically instead of by character.

[Sylvrdragon]

I'm on the very beginning of book 3 (about <5 chapters in) for the first time. It seems pretty unanimous that book 4 is the weakest link. Is it bad? Or boring? What exactly is it's problem without going into spoilers? I'll admit Martin does like to kill characters, but I don't think he's killed an obscene amount of important characters.

Spoilers about some deaths

Spoiler: show

The death of Ned really shocked me though. I really wasn't expecting that at all, which is kind of the point I suppose. Drogo's death was kind of unexpected as well. But not as shocking as Ned's. Tyrell's and Luwin's were eh. Kind of expected and not as sudden as the other two. The minor character deaths don't get at me too much. Those are a dime a dozen. If Tyrion had died, that would have really irked me. Him being a little uglier is fine.

Also; I don't know about others, but some of Tyrion's lines make me literally laugh out loud.

As I'm sure you've figured out by now, Martin names the chapters for the character who's point of view it was written in. The reason some people have a problem with Book 4 is because he had so many characters by that point who's POV he was writing that he figured it would be too convoluted and complicated to follow so many characters through the same stretch of time. So what he did was he split his character cast in half and decided to write half of them in book 4, and the other half in book 5 with a few overlapping into both. As such, some of the main characters simply aren't in book 4 (well, at least not from their point of view).

If you've ever read Wheel of Time, I recall there being 1 book that was nearly 1000 pages long that simply did not have the main protagonist and where the previous book left off with a cliffhanger involving said protagonist. Jordan caught a lot of shit for that, so naturally, Martin decided to do something similar, lol.

[Bweigelt]

It wasn't actually Martin's choice to split it, his publisher just didn't want a freaking 1500 page book. The problem was he couldn't figure out a way to split it chronologically, so he was forced to do it by characters. It also screwed up his writing, at the time they decided to split it he had almost the entire book completed, but when they split it he had to rewrite both books and that's why it took so long for both four and five to be released. The whole problem started though when he decided it just wasn't practical to have a 5 year gap like he had originally planned.

[Sylvrdragon]

Ahh, I was wondering if I had the facts right. Close enough.

[Baelorn]

It wasn't actually Martin's choice to split it, his publisher just didn't want a freaking 1500 page book. The problem was he couldn't figure out a way to split it chronologically, so he was forced to do it by characters. It also screwed up his writing, at the time they decided to split it he had almost the entire book completed, but when they split it he had to rewrite both books and that's why it took so long for both four and five to be released. The whole problem started though when he decided it just wasn't practical to have a 5 year gap like he had originally planned.

Honestly I find it incredibly hard to believe it took 6 years to rewrite ~700 pages of existing story.

[Bweigelt]

Honestly I find it incredibly hard to believe it took 6 years to rewrite ~700 pages of existing story.

Well what apparently happened was the split screwed up one major story line and most of the six years was spent trying to get that to work again.

[Man0warr]

He had a hard time figuring out how to get Daenrys out of Myrene and to the Seven Kingdoms. "The Myrenese Knot" as he called it, he was stuck on that for years.