I am a power reader. I read ALL THE TIME. Plus, I read a wide variety of genres, including epic fantasy, so I am not a novice at a complex familial structures and detailed world building sagas. I love 600+ page books, three or four to a series. I love action and fighting and intrigue and betrayal and sex and war.
I bought into the hype over the "A Song of Ice and Fire" saga, and got Game of Thrones, which is the first book.
Allow me to channel my inner Kaos for a moment.
It sucked major donkey ass. And GRRM is overrated like no author since James Patterson.
There are way too damn many characters and what character development there is either rushed or dragged out to the point of boredom. You certainly can't put the book down - no, literally, you cannot put the book down. if you go more than a day or two without reading it, you forget who the fuck all these damn people are.
The whole thing with the father being the right hand of the king and then he's not and then 400 pages later, we find out his ultimate fate? Who drags that out? NO PURPOSE. Killing off one of the wolves for no damn good reason? i am all about making no character off limits when it comes to tragedy - that takes guts - but all that happens WAY too early and then that plot line just trickled off... If he picks it up later, it will be too far removed from the revenge factor to have as much impact. There are too many secondary and tertiary plots and intrigues, and they all intersect too many places. Even worse, even though the reader knows who the baddies are, and the signs should be glaringly obvious to the other characters, it goes on for 200 pages before DUN DUN DUN... ZOMG, BETRAYAL!!11!! And we are supposed to accept that the characters are stunned? I guess they are all dumb as a bag of hammers then. Plus, I hate seeing stuff coming in such an obvious fashion - a good author only drops subtle hints so that there is maybe some degree of shock or suspense but here, you would have to be blind not to figure it all out.
Even worse, GRRM is an arrogant fuck. He has said in multiple interviews that he owes his readers NOTHING - they can just gorram well wait until he writes the next book at his own leisure. You stupid idiot - the books and those loyal readers got you here. Those books have been out for a while. So yeah, he does owe the reader.
I bought the first two books at the same time, and the second book remains unopened - a total waste of money. I slogged my way through the first one, thinking it HAD to get better.
Nope.
You guys like the show for the guts and the blood and the sex - which is fine. Not knocking that. But to say that the books are any good is a real stretch for me. I can think of five or six other authors or series who blow ASoIaF out of the water.
Anyone want any recommendations, PM me.