Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Had I written a review of Game of Thrones after reading the first book, it would be a solid 5 star review. Perhaps after the second in the series it would be the same, but after the third I could in honesty only have rated it a 3 or 4. However, after the 4th in this series I can only conclude that Mr. Martin is both a gifted writer of fiction as well as an author whose work should be ignored. To begin with, while the author writes well, he must be paid by the word since these novels are absolutely interminable in length. If you plan on being marooned for a few years on an island, or go to prison to do a nickel, just take this series with you. You'll still not finish. Second, the interesting alternating point of view between characters in the first three books metastasizes in the fourth with the addition of scores of new characters and their points of view while the points of view of other interesting characters developed in the first three suddenly disappear. Cases in point - Tyrion, the dwarf brother of the evil Jaime, is one of the most interesting characters in the first three volumes, yet he inexplicably disappears in the fourth. The second most interesting character in the volumes 1 - 3, Jon Snow, the bastard son of Eddard Stark, also makes no appearance in volume 4. Same with the third most interesting character, Danerys. Putting down volume 3, you really want to know what happens to her next. Fuggetaboutit. She's gone from volume 4. Imagine the Lord of Rings, where each volume is 3 times longer and Frodo Baggins makes no appearance in the third volume. Additionally, Mr. Martin likes to kill off his most important characters, or render them suddenly blind, or convert them from being evil to nice. Again, imagine Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn chokes to death on a mouthful of ale in the Two Towers, or Sauron turns out to be really a nice guy who's just irritated because a turkey buzzard flew into and got stuck in his big red eye. I guess my advice is to plow through these if you really don't mind being bitch slapped by an author. The writing is excellent and the world created intriguing. However, the story goes nowhere, and gets to nowhere via thousands of pages, all the while inserting and removing and altering characters at will. I gather that many are waiting for the grand finale in volume 6 that Martin has promised. If there is a God in heaven, we shall be spared. But if after this warning you still proceed on this irritating quest, do what I did. When you finally figure out that you are being punked by the author, ignore the sequence of the chapters. Just start with a character point of view and read each one for that character sequentially. There is a bare semblance of a plot anyway, so Lord knows, you won't spoil anything by reading ahead for a particular character since nothing happens anyway. When you get to volume 4, ignore all the randomly introduced new characters who add nothing to the story developed in the first three. This way, you can impose some small amount of coherence on an otherwise completely incoherent story structure, and trust me, you won't lose anything in the process, mostly because there is nothing to lose in the first place.