These things keep getting bigger! This one is 1128 pages which is way too many pages per day. Yeesh!
REVIEW: A Storm of Swords is by far the darkest volume in this series so far. There was a point in the first book that had me so outraged that I wanted to put the book down and quit. This book has several such moments. With The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was able to balance tragedy with heroism, but the realistic tone of Martin’s books don’t allow that kind of escapism. As a result, the story falls deep into tragedy leaving you wondering who will even remain alive at the end of the series to put the pieces of the world back together again.
The survivors of this book continue to live, however, and fight desperately to do so... and similarly, I continue my struggle to continue through to the next book. The writing and the plot are still ponderously slow with almost a hundred pages at the beginning simply bringing the reader up to speed with the characters from the last book. There are very good scenes to be had, though, and the battles are particularly brilliant with the fighting at the Wall in the north as shining examples. In fact, all the parts dealing with the characters in the far north, at and beyond the Wall are, by far, my favorites.
The fall from grace and/or death of many of my favorite characters gave birth to some very strong nihilism. There was a very large part of me that wanted the armies from across the sea to come and burn the whole thing to the ground. This world needs a clean slate at this point and it’s hard to predict what Martin will do next. There are still 2 books in the series I have yet to read, however, and 2 more that are still unwritten, so I’m sure that the author has very large and very complex plans for them. He is nothing if not painstakingly detailed.
The big swing into tragedy in this volume, coupled with the same slow, extremely detailed plot progression made this one harder to read than the previous: 6 out of 10.
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