A Dance with Dragons

Too many thoughts, too little willingness on my part to edit them into a concise and free-flowing post. To bullet points we go!

• Man. What now? After spending the past six months fully engrossing myself in this franchise, I'm all caught up to everyone else, waiting impatiently for the sixth book to arrive and hoping the third season of the HBO show doesn't screw everything up. After twenty hours of television and 5,000 pages of serialized storytelling, I'll be doing nothing Game of Thrones related for a long, long time. (Unless any newcomers want to gather 'round for a Season 1 marathon someday soon. Eh? Ah? Anyone?)
• Rest assured. This book was much better than its predecessor, A Feast for Crows. The unpopular and questionable decision made by GRRM (I can call him that now; I've earned that) to split the story into two parallel books following the spectacular third book left A Dance with Dragons free to pick up where A Storm of Swords left off for half of the characters in the series. And since this book ran close to 50% longer than A Feast for Crows, its final third brought several of that book's characters and elements back into focus, too. GRRM has gone on record saying he was never really happy with the decision to split the story into two parallel books at this point, but admits he saw no easy way to deal with how dense and heavy his story had become without either omitting half the characters or cutting all of their stories short. At least in this book I rarely felt as though what I was reading was needlessly tacked on and irrelevant to the larger story; the same could not be said of A Feast for Crows, which was paradoxically both much longer than it had any need to be and also far less substantial.
• Still, even though GRRM split the stories geographically so as to better serve the storytelling aspect of his series, plenty of arcs from both this book and the last one feel unfinished at this point. And I'm counting huge cliffhangers as "finished plots" because I know the story will resume once more in the (hopefully near) future. What I mean is that there were a couple of plots that just kind of stopped one or two chapters short of a natural stopping point. GRRM has acknowledged this, admitting that he had to bump about five or ten various chapters due to the sheer heft and length of this book. The good news is that this means he was already like 200 pages done writing the sixth book from the get-go. The bad news is that for the second time in a row, the book doesn't end on a perfectly satisfactory note.
• The first four books in the series were given to me for my birthday back in May, all in trade paperback form. I finished the fourth one on July 15th, and was prepared to take a small break before buying the fifth one in trade paperback on its release date in late August. Then the trade paperback release date got pushed back to next March, and I had no desire to wait that long to see what happened next, so I dropped three times the price on a hardcover copy and ended up not taking so much of a break after all.
• GRRM, who has earned a notorious reputation for missing deadlines, has estimated that he should (or was it "could?") be done with the sixth book in 2014. I won't hold my breath, but a 2015 release date seems reasonable. Of course, the gap between the last two books was six years, and he had originally planned on that gap being one year. So, hey, we may never even see a sixth book.
• The first book was told from nine different characters' points of view. This one was told from eighteen such points of view, and there were seven additional points of view from A Feast for Crows that didn't wind up getting revisited here. Thus far in the series there have been chapters told from 31 unique points of view, and only one of them has been maintained across all five books. There are at least a hundred principal characters in the series and there must be close to a thousand named characters by now. The fictional world includes two massive continents full of various cultures, languages, and religions, and plenty of both have yet to be explored or examined in any detail. So, yeah. Maybe the story is just starting to sag under its own massive weight a little bit, but holy shit is it ambitious.