A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin (3.5 stars)

Hooray! Back to all the good characters. Except not really. Tyrion has turned into some sort of ironic sideshow act, in the words of Kate Morris 'all he really manages to do is play a lot of Stratego, reminisce about a previously-unmentioned happy boyhood of gymnastics training in the art of dwarfish capering, and fall convincingly off a trained pig'.

But lets acknowledge some of the good bits, and thankfully there were more of those than in Feast. When Bran is ambushed by a bunch of wights in a scene straight out of Dead Snow I stopped reading just long enough to let out a 'Hells Yeah!'. His apprenticeship to the three-eyed-crow (btw I loved the idea of a half-man, half-weirwood tree, complete with a root growing out of his eye socket) is fascinating. Jon's chapters continued to be some of the best as he creates a fragile peace with the wildlings.

Arya's training with the faceless men finally gets interesting as they intentionally blind her and give her a face from the thousands of dead people they have skinned(!) We also get to watch an assassination through her eyes, complete with a con reminiscent of early locke days.

...faces full of greed and rage and lust, bald faces and faces bristling with hair. Masks, she told herself, it's only masks, but even as she thought the thought, she knew it wasn't so. They were skins.

But it just isn't enough. The story doesn't move as much as it should have, especially given GRRM had 1000+ pages to work with. Tyrion and Victarion are still travelling to meet Daenerys. She's mooning around with Daario while Tyrion is being a circus act, and the dragons barely feature. Neither Arya or Bran finish their training. Stannis doesn't reach Winterfell. The others don't attack the wall. Is there anything more boring than reading about someone being bored?

Life aboard the Selaesori Qhoran was nothing if not tedious, Tyrion had found. The most exciting part of his day was pricking his toes and fingers with a knife.

And just to make sure you know he has still got it, Martin kills off a major character. I felt like he was trying to make a point like 'see? In this world, one careless decision can kill you', and while I respect the 'nobody is safe' ruthlessness, this reeks of an ad-break cliffhanger that will end up with resurrection by magic or subterfuge a la Catelyn, Mance, Davos...

So, not as bad as Feast, but not as good as it could be. Here's hoping he actually finishes the series sometime in the next couple of decades. Getting overtaken by the HBO series might provide some motivation. I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one."

If this were a story, he would gallop up just as we reached the temple, to challenge Hizdahr for my hand...Four hours later, they emerged again as man and wife, bound together wrist and ankle with chains of yellow gold. [guess this isn't a story then]

The Lyseni took the table nearest to the fire and spoke quietly over cups of black tar rum, keeping their voices low so no one could overhear. But she was no one and she heard most every word.

"You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of your coming."
"And I seem to have prevented yours." Jaime smiled at the woman in the bed.

3.5 stars

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (2.5 stars)

Wow, what a let down. After finishing A Storm of Swords I immediately began this one, which is a luxury real fans wouldn't have had since there was a five year wait in-between. Martin made a decision to cut the too-long fourth book in half, not chronologically, but geographically, so in A Feast for Crows he gives us all the boring characters bumping around for 1000 pages with nothing interesting happening.

In fact, here is a summary of the entire book:

• Cersei ad nauseum. Making one stupid decision after another in Kings Landing. Not interesting stupid, just boring, incompetent stupid.
• Brienne on a completely pointless quest for Sansa, never coming within 1000 miles of her. Her story ends on a lame made-for-tv cliffhanger.
• Jaime mopes around wishing he had two hands and being mad at Cersei. He starts training with his left hand but doesn't get any good.
  
• Sam is on a boat. There's a storm. He gets laid. He also apparently can't tell one baby from another since Aemon has to tell him about the baby swap.
• Sansa continues her compliant relationship in the Eyrie with Petyr and his creepy mother-daughter fetish. Their trip down the mountain is described in such intricate detail I was sure Sansa was going to crack it and push Robert off the edge (I wanted to), but instead, surprise! Nothing happens.
• Arya picks up what promised to be an awesome new training montage with the Faceless men, but, amazingly, it also turns out to be boring.
• Arianne of Dorne has a gutsy plan to start a war. It doesn't work.
• A bunch of minor characters you don't care about get their own one-off point of view chapter to do something that is of minor importance to the story.

The tragedy of this book is that it is brilliantly written, and could have been amazing if there had been some significant plot developments. Sure the iron men needed a new king, and the church's rise to power was important to the story, but those points and more could have been covered in a lot less than 1000 pages. I initially hated the chapters about the ironborn, since it was a bunch of new characters I didn't care about. However, I was won over to some extent by Aeron Damphair's character and his drowned men, literally drowned and resuscitated, and I hope we see him again in the story. My favourite quote from this part of the book was from Lord Rodrik 'The Reader':

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

Looking back over the rest of my notes, they were all complaining about stuff so I'll skip listing them all here and leave with one final whinge. In the first couple of books I loved the use of 'much and more', but it has been so overused I'd now give much and more to never read it again.

2.5 stars

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (5 stars)

Geez, give the good guys a break! Being brave and taking the moral high ground in a Martin novel is like donning the Star Trek Red Shirt. While I like Martin's gritty reality, it seems that there are no characters on the lighter side of the fuzzy moral divide who won't bravely and stubbornly chart a course for their own death, usually by trusting in the good character of others who are obviously untrustworthy. A few examples spring to mind: Catelyn releases Jaime then trusts the Freys, Robb releases Theon, and Sansa trusts absolutely anyone on the face of the Earth. I can only assume that Brienne's downfall is imminent, with a sword called Oathkeeper, and an already pigheaded attitude to keeping now-irrelevant promises to dead people.

I expected Sansa to continue to be lame and stupid, and she was, but I have been surprised by Arya. She seems to be trying to be held captive by every single character in the novel, something which simultaneously annoyed me, and impressed me. I don't think I've ever read of a character going through such an intensive training montage to be consistently beaten and captured at almost every opportunity. At the end of the first book I wrote that I'd be impressed if Martin killed her off - I think I'm more impressed that he made her so helpless.

Spoilers ahead.

And speaking of killing off characters, Martin does it with great relish in this book. The 'Red Wedding' is fantastically written: if you don't pick up earlier signals, Catelyn's naive faith in the sanctity of 'guest rite' is almost comical foreshadowing:

Catelyn tasted the wine and nibbled at some bread, and felt much better for it. Now we should be safe, she thought.

The wedding marks a great turning point in this novel, when all of a sudden all the story lines get awesome at once. Jon is with, then against, the wildlings in a series of epic battles. Daenerys acquires an army, frees a bunch of slaves, and becomes a military strategic genius. Jaime, Tyrion and the Night's Watch take some completely unexpected actions, and the novel ends with a bunch of surprising character deaths.

If only Martin had compressed some of the build-up in the first half of the novel I think it would be pretty much perfect. I won't say I was bored, but with each new character introduction, and each discussion of who should be wedded to who I despaired of the plot getting anywhere.

Having said that I am very impressed with this series. I've never read anything so epic, so complex, with so many different stories that could quite easily be novels in their own right. It was nice to see Martin made a conscious effort to insert small re-caps and memory triggers - I guess it was important given the novels were released a number of years apart.

And now for a bunch of nits, observations, and predictions:

• I really hope 'Hodor' ends up having some profound meaning and some key part to play. It seems more than a little strange that he understands everyone's speech perfectly but can only say one word...
• I assumed Tryion was being manipulated through Shae by Varys, but Tyrion removed that plot line in this book, so perhaps not.
• I liked hearing about Robb's interesting military tactics, that were screwed up by an overzealous Tully.
• The creatures of the north seemed fairly ridiculous in an otherwise fairly 'normal' world - giants, mammoths, and:
  

  Varamyr Sixskins, a small mouse of a man whose steed was a savage white snow bear that stood thirteen feet tall on its hind legs. And wherever the bear and Varamyr went, three wolves and a shadowcat came following.

• One of the trade items Daenerys is bargaining with for the Unsullied is 'a cask of pitted olives stuff with maggots'. And this is apparently worth money?
  
• What is with Martin and his need for female characters to stick perfume in weird places. First Daenerys, now Sansa is at it:
  

  The maid dabbed some on her finger and touched Sansa behind each ear, and under her chin, and then lightly on her nipples.




• Sandor Clegane rips the fairly ridiculous 'Forgotten Fellowship' to shreds with verbal disdain:
  

  "Dondarrion's a knight, but the rest of you are the sorriest lot of outlaws and broken men I've ever seen. I shit better men than you."
  "Any knight can make a knight," said the scarecrow that was Beric Dondarrion, "and every man you see before you has felt a sword upon his shoulder. We are the forgotten fellowship."
  "Send me on my way and I'll forget you too," Clegane rasped.




• What is it with people eating swan all the time? Tyrion even mentions it, maybe because Martin's editors complained:
  

  ("Not swan again," Tyrion muttered, remembering his supper with his sister on the eve of battle.)



• I'm getting a little sick of the constant cliffhangers - every time the story gets really interesting Martin switches to another point of view. Sometimes this is great because it saves on unnecessary detail and gives a different perspective on events, but I think it is tending towards being over-used.
  

Many and more pages have been read (about 3,000), many and more to go (about 2,000 currently published).

5 stars.

Best of 2011 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Seabiscuit: an American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
• The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

This year turned out to be a quite a bit of fantasy reading, especially since I climbed aboard the multi-thousand-page epic A Song of Ice and Fire series in November. Once I'm done with that series I think I'll head back towards some sci-fi. I broke my "There are too many interesting books to re-read anything" motto this year for Catch-22, which was hard work, but worth it.

I only had one really terrible reading experience this year that resulted in another book getting 0 stars. On another sad note I also read less books than last year, although I have some decent excuses having had a baby, moved countries, and started a new job.

Speaking of changes, the way I read has changed dramatically. This year marks the beginning of my move to digital. I love the convenience of snatching time to read books on my phone at every opportunity, such as standing in line for a coffee, or riding the bus to work, and then picking up the kindle for longer reading sessions. I paid US$9-$14 for each book (from Amazon's kindle store), which is the price and convenience point at which I decided to abandon public libraries. Having previously been a huge supporter of public libraries it concerns me what this direction means for the medium to long term future of libraries worldwide.

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (4 stars)

Book 2, and apparently the clashing of the five(!) kings was obvious enough without Martin having to get his characters to say it every few pages as he did for Game of Thrones. This novel continues on with the epic plot arc, I believe this was about 1000 pages, although it is hard to tell on the kindle, and felt very similar to the first book. Most reviews I have read seem to regard this as a weaker book. I have some bones to pick but it was still a very impressive and a worthy sequel.

For such a long novel, I was amazed that I was never bored. I was however, confused many times. Who is this Reek guy again? Where is the Dreadfort? Which army is this? Martin expects a lot of the reader - too much on some occasions. When Jojen's prophesy comes true to prove to Bran that he has the power of foresight, Martin expects us to remember the exact cryptic details provided by Jojen hundreds of pages earlier and doesn't bother with any sort of recap.

It wasn't a supper like you said. It was a letter from Robb and we didn't eat it, but-

Martin also does the same with Jojen's later prophesy about the sea breaking over Winterfell. More broadly, being able to hold together all the story threads, which are continually broken by point-of-view changes, is difficult (but still realistic unlike The Savage Detectives). It is probably the most complex plot, in terms of sheer number of characters and the intricacy of their interactions, I have read and still enjoyed. Keeping track of armies and lords in a bewildering array of different castles would be a lot easier with a geographic map. Is it just the kindle edition that is missing maps?

I loved the battle for Kings Landing on the Blackwater river, it was very well written and fascinating to watch the trap sprung. That is, until Tyrion suddenly becomes a dwarf warrior powerhouse cutting down knights and leading a battle charge. This was completely out of character and pretty ridiculous when you consider the reach and strength advantages Stannis' knights would have had on a highborn dwarf who never trains for combat.

Almost as implausible is the fact that all of Tyrion's wildling fighters stayed in his service after they got paid for their efforts in the first novel. Would a bunch of proud, blood-hungry savages with necklaces of human ears really have been happy to sit around in a castle on guard dog duty for a rich lord?

I found Dany's encounter with the warlocks' hallucinogenic maze highly entertaining because it reminded me of a physical challenge or amazing race detour. Although there was another prophesy involved, and no doubt Martin expects me to remember details like this 2000 pages later:

A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood beneath the banner of a fiery stallion, a burning city behind him. Rubies flew like drops of blood from the chest of the dying prince, and he sank to his knees in the water and with his last breath murmured a woman's name...

When I say I was never bored, that isn't quite true. I got sick of boring royal history like this:

Aemon took his vows and left the Citadel to serve at some lordling's court...until his royal uncle dies without issue. The Iron Throne passed to the last of King Daeron's four sons. That was Maekar, Aemon's father. The new king summoned all his sons to court and would have made Aemon part of his councils, but he refused, saying that that would usurp the place rightly belonging to the Grand Maester. Instead he served at the keep of his eldest brother, another Daeron. Well, that one died too, leaving only...

I'll end this with some of my favourite quotes. This zinger is from Renly, who I think was a great character, it's a shame he gets killed off:

Stannis studied her, unsmiling. "The Iron Throne is mine by rights. All those who deny that are my foes."
"The whole of the realm denies it, brother" said Renly. "Old men deny it with their death rattle, and unborn children deny it in their mother's wombs. They deny it in Dorne and they deny it on the Wall. No one wants you for their king.

There was some great stuff from Sandor Clegane, including this dig which seems to be aimed partly at other fantasy novels that shrink from violence. Clegane is also starting to seem like less of a bad guy through Sansa's possibly-Stockholm-syndrome eyes:

What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it's all taking favors from ladies and looking fine in gold plat? Knights are for killing.

The whole section of dialogue between Catelyn and Jaime in the dungeon was brilliant - we saw the true nature of their characters at their most candid moment. This quote from Jaime sums his arrogance up perfectly:

There are no men like me. There's only me.

Onward! Winter is coming.

4 stars.

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (4.5 stars)

Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series has been on my list for a long time. A desire to watch the HBO series finally pushed me into picking up the first weighty tome, well figuratively anyway, this is yet another very heavy book I was happy to carry around digitally on my kindle, and as an aside, the typographic complaints about the kindle edition are all out-of-date, I didn't notice any problems.

I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but this novel grabbed me with its dark tone and intricately constructed characters. There is no clear good and evil here, no perfect shining knights who take the moral high-ground at all costs and always win the day, and no fundamentally evil Sauron-style bad guys either. Martin constructs characters that face tough moral choices, make both good and bad decisions, and die. Yes, main characters actually die, and not just the ones on the evil side of the fuzzy moral divide. I think Tyrion is my favourite character so far.

Of course to allow for the deaths of important characters you're going to need quite a few characters to carry the story. Martin uses about 8 different character points of view, and introduces a huge cast of characters throughout the novel, both in the central plot line and while filling in the history of each of the houses. There are a lot of houses, and despite the house-symbol mnemonics, I struggled to keep track of all the minor players, especially when the various lords 'called their banners' to gather their armies. I also got fairly sick of reading about dire wolves and dragons embroidered onto tunics or painted onto armour.

I felt like this novel was mainly build-up and stage setting for a truly epic tale, which is fine, although I certainly found myself wishing for some more action in the first two thirds of the novel. The first two thirds was mainly court intrigue, political machinations, and the occasional I'm-going-to-be-a-ninja-later-just-watch-me training montage from Arya. By the way, I'll be very impressed if Martin kills off Arya before she gets to unleash her fighting skills on the Lannisters. Oh, and if Martin manages to not mention 'a clash of kings' every few pages in A Clash of Kings, that would be great too - it reminded me of this youtube video.

While I'm at it lets get a few other minor things out of the way. Martin went to great lengths to create an impregnable fortress, and in the process made the Eyrie a ridiculously impractical place to live. You basically need to do a day's worth of exposed rock-climbing up a cliff past many fortifications to get there. I'm all for impregnable fortresses (I'm sure this one will get taken by deception, not force, in later books), but a castle like that is somewhere you retreat to as a last resort, not somewhere you live day-to-day, hold court, receive guests etc.

I loved Martin's description of the iron throne constructed from swords, I hope the HBO props department did a good job of it.

Sansa's naivety and selfishness (such as forgetting to even ask about her sister Arya) after the capture of her father was very well written and the culmination of her character construction up to that point. Eddard was naive in many ways himself, and I was glad to see that things didn't magically pan out for him just because he's a good guy.

Two dragons breastfeeding from a human woman is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.

Yes, I have started on the next book :)

4.5 stars

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (3.5 stars)

It's clever, very clever. Comedy in the form of a novel is one of the toughest gigs around. Getting someone to laugh with just the written word, without the benefit of the body language and expression that comes with images or a live performance, requires a special talent. Heller has that talent, although I confess the best he got from me was a few 'heh's.

Heller wields absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy as weapons to expose the absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy of war and military bureaucracy. In effect it feels like a really, really long Monty Python skit written down in words. Clevinger's mistake in asking the audience for questions after a briefing would also fit perfectly as a Blackadder scene, with these responses:

"Who is Spain?"
"Why is Hitler?"
"When is righ?"
"Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?"
"How was trump at Munich?"
"Ho-ho beriberi."
and
"Balls!"
all rang out in rapid succession.

Heller brings his acid touch to a wide range of subjects from the meaningless military pennants awarded for meaningless activities:

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

to the agricultural subsidies that benefited Major Major Major's family (and yes, he is promoted in the novel to Major, making him Major Major Major Major), which pretty much fits exactly with the republican position on US corn subsidies:

Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.

The plot is complex. It dives down tangent after tangent and continually introduces new characters while jumping all over the place. Despite all that confusion it is in fact highly structured. Early in the novel Heller writes as if the reader is intimately familiar with a series of events which have not yet been described. These story threads are eventually explained and tied back in much later in the novel, finally providing the context for a joke that was already told.

And of course the novel gave birth to a phrase that is now common vernacular. Not many novels can claim such an obvious effect on popular culture:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

The characters are excellent, and you come to realise that despite some unusual behaviour (such as perching naked in a tree to watch a funeral), Yossarian is extremely rational and entirely sensible to be trying to avoid getting killed.

A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishman are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Heller's portrayal of Milo's black market empire and the market forces that eventually bring him to bomb his own troops is absurd and masterful.

Towards the end of the novel we are brought roughly into the horror of war as Yossarian has a dream-like walk through a Rome soaked in violence and we finally witness Snowden's death that pushed Yossarian over the edge. This is the section I liked the least. The final chapters lose all comedy and become a series of long discussions, such as the one between Yossarian and Major Danby, that seem very direct and out of character. It's almost like Heller got to the end and decided: quick, drive the point home!

This was my second time through this novel and it isn't an easy read. I'm giving it a fairly low score to match my level of enjoyment, but I think it is definitely worth reading.

3.5 stars.