I know I’ve said before that I’m entirely addicted to A Song of Ice and Fire. I really can’t help myself. I love these books. Reading so many long books, though, is getting me into crunch time if I’m going to make fifty by the end of the year. Which means I’m going to force myself to read a string of shorter books when I’d really rather be reading It. But that’s another matter.
So. A Feast for Crows is really half of a book. George R.R. Martin even says as much in an afterward, which begins,
“Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Where’s Dany and the dragons? Where’s Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. That can’t be all of it…”
Yep. No Daenerys, no Tyrion, no Wall. no Stannis. I was anxiously waiting for the rest of the characters to make an appearance, but they never did. Which, really, is fine. Not long ago, someone told me that Game of Thrones slows down in the fourth book, and it certainly does, but not in a bad way. I was surprised at how few deaths there were, especially after A Storm of Swords, which was downright ridiculous.
And here’s the spoiler alert. In no particular order, here are the events of note: Arya is in Braavos, a novice at the House of White and Black, alternately spending her time there and selling cockles, and the like, to the locals. Sam, Maester Aemon, Gilly, her baby (well, not hers), and a singer-turned-crow whose name I don’t remember are headed for Oldtown (to the Citadel), but the end up in Braavos for a while. Arya knows what the singer is up to and, apparently, slits his throat. Maester Aemon dies there. They were fleeing Melisandre because some of them had royal blood, and she wants to wake a dragon. But that was the last book. Riverrun is taken after a long siege. Brienne goes searching for Sansa but ends up tried and killed by Zombie Catelyn Stark. Cersei is up to her usual mischief but just might get her comeuppance soon, though I’m not expecting that in the next book, as she probably won’t be in that one much at all. But who knows! Sansa is still at the Eyrie, pretending to be Littlefinger’s daughter. The Dornishmen have been active, and we learn that a Dornish princess was promised to marry Daenerys’s brother before all hell broke loose. And Myrcella got her ear cut off. At the end of the book, Jaime got a raven from Cersei, who was begging him to save her in a trial by combat because the new High Septon finally decided that she should be punished, but he tore up the paper and threw it in the fire.
Okay, end of spoiler. That’s all I can think of right now, but There Was Much Mischief, as usual.
I think this will be my last Game of Thrones book for the year, as I need to finish my fifty. I’m waffling back and forth on whether I’m going to set that goal for next year, though I think it does make me read more, which has been the goal after I got through 2010 having read only twenty, or so, books. And I’ve certainly worked some long ones in this year. Now, though, since I’m so close, I’m going with more reasonably-sized books until I hit the fifty, and then I’ll make a decision.
