Book 15: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

Well, here we go, the second part of the epic series by George R.R. Martin.  The end of the last book was action-packed and spurred my interest after a very long introduction.  This book promises to be full of action and intrigue.  I have a few friends that, when I mentioned that I was debating reading all of the books in a month (there were only 4 at the time), said that it wasn't possible.  Seeing that as a challenge, I'm off and running into book 2... and it's a huge one: 969 pages in my edition.  That's a whopping 140 pages per day just to stay on schedule.  I'm gonna need a whole lot of luck to finish these on time.

REVIEW:  Finally finished this book.  The story is moving along a bit better now but Martin still bogs himself down with too much detail.  I appreciate it to a degree because a lot of the realism is from the attention paid to the details, but sometimes he just digresses took much from the story.  For instance, the characters have frequent feasts and Martin likes to describe it in minute detail:

"They began with pears poached in wine, and went on to tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms.  There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley.  For the sweet, Lord Caswell's servants brought down trays of pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese."

Sounds tasty, but come on, get on with the story.  He tends to do this sort of thing with food, banners, any kind of group of people, et cetera.  While the story is interesting and the action is moving along, it moves very slowly.  It reminds me of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan in that way... both authors take about 1,000 pages to move an army from one city to the next.  Is it realistic?  Sure.  Is it interesting?  Well, yes.  But it takes quite a bit of determination to get through it.

I can still think of several fantasy genre series that I like better than this one.  The story is very interesting, the characters are rich and the setting is detailed but, it just moves so slowly that I find myself wanting to skip ahead a few pages now and then.  Overall, I found it a bit better than the previous due to the plot picking up speed a bit:  8 out of 10.