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bloodygranuaileAs promised: blogulating on George R. R. Martin's finally-published A Dance with Dragons!
After six years, this book was finally published last Tuesday, at which time I got a signed copy. You can read here about why my life is awesome and you should be jealous. Sadly, I did not get to take the next few days off of work just to read it, so I just finished it this afternoon.
First off, what I did not like about the book: Typing errors! There are like, four or five. I realize it is a big book (it is a good thousand pages or so) but seriously, I have read entire books that are just as long with no typing errors! Bantam, if you need extra proofreaders, gimme a call--I'll be down to only working 41 hours a week soon; I'd be happy to help out!
What I did like about the book: It is large and heavy! While the book jacket is beautiful, the actual cover is too--a smooth clean white with shiny red embossing. The maps on the endpapers are gorgeous, and they include a map of the Nine Free Cities. The paper is thinner than most hardcovers (otherwise the book would weigh like twelve pounds) but not thin enough to start being all tissue-papery and semitransparent.
So, that's what I think of the book; now onto what I think of the story! (Please do not ever let me know if you hear a worse joke than that. I am sorry, gentle reader.)
My first thoughts upon starting to read were basically things that we've all been expecting for six years, but that didn't get any the less awesome for that. These thoughts were basically "TYRION IS BACK!!! DANY IS BACK!!! JON SNOW IS BACK!!!" and then I melted into a puddle of fangirly glee.
Tyrion is still awesome, although he is even more bitter and angry and kind of douchey than he was even before, due to the revelations and events at the end of A Storm of Swords. He spends much of the first half of the book trying to figure out Where Whores Go, even while getting somewhat unwittingly pulled right back into the game of thrones, except this time half a world away. Tyrion's resilience and versatility fits right in with the "trickster" archetype and somewhat less well with Martin's previously ultra-heavy anyone-can-die gritty realism thing--over the course of ADWD Tyrion ends up in more semicomical near-death situations and takes on more roles than Jacky in a Bloody Jack novel. The two things Tyrion does not do are die, or get where he was planning on going. Which is a little disappointing, as I really want to see what happens when he gets where he is going. (He is really close now, though. Mr. Martin, you had better not stall Tyrion out through all of The Winds of Winter, too! I will be so cranky if you do.)
While Tyrion's misadventures occasionally take on a slight picaresque quality, Dany's chapters are decidedly not funny. Dany ended A Storm of Swords as newly installed queen of the slave-trading city of Mereen, after defeating the slave cities of Astapor and Yunkai (in Astapor she freed the slaves; Yunkai surrendered so she mostly left it alone). Dany's story bears resemblance to no other literary form so much as an American History book about Reconstruction, except with more jaw-cracking names and a dose of child-eating unruly dragons. Dany attempts to rebuild a peace in these cities without unnecessary bloodshed; this basically means that she is unwilling to feed the entire slave-owning class of all three cities to her dragons, which is what Tywin Lannister would have done. This means, of course, that a Klan-like terrorist group called the Sons of the Harpy wreak havoc within the city while the armies of the other slaving cities mass outside of it in order to lay siege if the peace doesn't go exactly the way they want it to. Since Dany can't really control her dragons anymore (there are downsides to owning the first dragons the world has seen in centuries--like, there are no reliable dragon-training resources around), she is not in a good position to defend herself and her people, let alone start being actually constructive. There are also like fourteen different fucking people in or voyaging towards Mereen dead set on marrying her, each one of them completely oblivious to the notion that they may not be the only dude in the world who has had this idea. Tyrion seems to be the only guy in the East not hellbent on wedding or bedding her, which kind of makes me ship Dany/Tyrion from sheer contrariness. They can bond over having both had badly-ending marriages and batshit crazy fathers!
Also, Dany needs to learn more about how batshit crazy her father was, like NOW. Otherwise it's gonna be super ugly when she rides into Westeros all "The only reason anybody would have fought against my father was because they were DIRTY DISLOYAL TRAITORS!" and everyone else is going to be all "Uhh, if you really can't imagine why people might become disloyal to a king after he's roasted their fathers in their own armor and stuff, maybe we don't want you as queen after all." I know she has a lot on her plate but, even after learning that Viserys was a total loon, she still basically accepts his version of Westerosi history and only has some sort of vague notion that maybe she's missed stuff and she should get Barristan to give her the real scoop, like, eventually. She's almost as presumptious and oblivious as her bajillion we-don't-even-realize-we-have-rivals suitors. And she has terrible taste in men.
Speaking of taste in men: I have the biggest literary crush EVER on Jon Snow. Particularly now that he has not only stopped emo-ing around the wall being like "this is not as fun as I thought it was going to be, the other brothers are meeeean to me" but is the Lord Commander and has gone all strategical and multicultural and stuff. Jon has ties to nearly everybody at this point--he has highborn family ties in the Seven Kingdoms, is sword to the Night's Watch, and miraculously still manages to sort of have friends among the wildlings after his undercover adventures earlier. He's come out of the whole Ygritte thing with "I know nothing" as his personal motto, which turns out to be a pretty good idea, because he winds up being the only person constantly challenging his own and everyone else's assumptions, willing to listen to input and ideas from any quarter, and continually hellbent on learning more about whatever they're facing. (Frequently this involves sending Sam to do research, but it also means he ends up hanging on to some dead guys on purpose so that if they come back as wights the Watch can learn more about them.) Jon's role in this book ends up somewhat paralleling Dany's story, in that he is attempting to build peace between the Watch, the wildlings, and Stannis/Melisandre's men, so that they can all fight the Others together. Sadly, most of the time Jon is the only one seemingly capable of remembering about the Others for more than ten seconds at a go; everyone else is too busy bickering over religion and lineage and ancient enmities and 'oo killed 'oo.
There is a thread over at the westeros.org forums that is basically "How Hot Is Jon Snow." It is hilarious.
There are a lot of new POV characters, too, including Ser Barristan Selmy and the Lady Melisandre. Getting inside Lady Melisandre's head was particularly interesting, since she's always been such a big flashy static sort of character. But she seems to have some pretty interesting backstory hidden away...
Speaking of POVs, Martin has in this book started relying a LOT more heavily on a trick he started using when Arya was getting really heavily into the "I have a different identity every time something happens to me" thing, which is naming the POV chapters after nicknames, titles, aliases and descriptors instead of the character's standard name. Each one of Ser Barristan's chapters has a different title; none of them are "BARRISTAN". Arya continues to be CAT OF THE CANALS or THE UGLY LITTLE GIRL or whatever the heck else. This occasionally gets a little annoying; at least the Jon and Dany and Tyrion chapters all continue to be identified as JON and DANAERYS and TYRION. At other times, though, it is super awesome, such as the chapter entitled REEK, because there was a character known as Reek in the second book, but... this is somebody else. And figuring out who while reading the actual text of the chapter was much more satisfying than if it had just been given away in the heading.
I do have to say I feel that Martin went easy on us in terms of the usual Anyone Can Die business; instead, we end this book with several fewer characters dead than I'd thought at the end of Feast for Crows! And even the Big Death at the end that I was dreading seems ambiguous enough that I do not know if that character is actually dead or not. There were a number of really satisfying deaths of people we really wanted to see dead, but no major "good" guys or even really enormously game-changing bad guys like Lord Tywin. However, there are at least five people I was at least mostly sure were dead at the end of the last book who turn out to be not remotely dead at all, and at least one more faked murder during this book, and there's a bit of speculation on the westeros.org board about what other secondary characters could REALLY be more people we thought were deaded years ago. One or two of these Sekrit Identity Reveals needs to fall through (twists within twists!) otherwise it's going to be a little bit too much like a regular fantasy.
On the other hand: heavily implied Frey pies. Lord Wyman Manderly, you are the BEST glutton in literary history.
I hope The Winds of Winter doesn't take another six years; this book was awesome but it didn't move the plot too far forward, and it definitely raised more questions than it answered.
After six years, this book was finally published last Tuesday, at which time I got a signed copy. You can read here about why my life is awesome and you should be jealous. Sadly, I did not get to take the next few days off of work just to read it, so I just finished it this afternoon.
First off, what I did not like about the book: Typing errors! There are like, four or five. I realize it is a big book (it is a good thousand pages or so) but seriously, I have read entire books that are just as long with no typing errors! Bantam, if you need extra proofreaders, gimme a call--I'll be down to only working 41 hours a week soon; I'd be happy to help out!
What I did like about the book: It is large and heavy! While the book jacket is beautiful, the actual cover is too--a smooth clean white with shiny red embossing. The maps on the endpapers are gorgeous, and they include a map of the Nine Free Cities. The paper is thinner than most hardcovers (otherwise the book would weigh like twelve pounds) but not thin enough to start being all tissue-papery and semitransparent.
So, that's what I think of the book; now onto what I think of the story! (Please do not ever let me know if you hear a worse joke than that. I am sorry, gentle reader.)
My first thoughts upon starting to read were basically things that we've all been expecting for six years, but that didn't get any the less awesome for that. These thoughts were basically "TYRION IS BACK!!! DANY IS BACK!!! JON SNOW IS BACK!!!" and then I melted into a puddle of fangirly glee.
Tyrion is still awesome, although he is even more bitter and angry and kind of douchey than he was even before, due to the revelations and events at the end of A Storm of Swords. He spends much of the first half of the book trying to figure out Where Whores Go, even while getting somewhat unwittingly pulled right back into the game of thrones, except this time half a world away. Tyrion's resilience and versatility fits right in with the "trickster" archetype and somewhat less well with Martin's previously ultra-heavy anyone-can-die gritty realism thing--over the course of ADWD Tyrion ends up in more semicomical near-death situations and takes on more roles than Jacky in a Bloody Jack novel. The two things Tyrion does not do are die, or get where he was planning on going. Which is a little disappointing, as I really want to see what happens when he gets where he is going. (He is really close now, though. Mr. Martin, you had better not stall Tyrion out through all of The Winds of Winter, too! I will be so cranky if you do.)
While Tyrion's misadventures occasionally take on a slight picaresque quality, Dany's chapters are decidedly not funny. Dany ended A Storm of Swords as newly installed queen of the slave-trading city of Mereen, after defeating the slave cities of Astapor and Yunkai (in Astapor she freed the slaves; Yunkai surrendered so she mostly left it alone). Dany's story bears resemblance to no other literary form so much as an American History book about Reconstruction, except with more jaw-cracking names and a dose of child-eating unruly dragons. Dany attempts to rebuild a peace in these cities without unnecessary bloodshed; this basically means that she is unwilling to feed the entire slave-owning class of all three cities to her dragons, which is what Tywin Lannister would have done. This means, of course, that a Klan-like terrorist group called the Sons of the Harpy wreak havoc within the city while the armies of the other slaving cities mass outside of it in order to lay siege if the peace doesn't go exactly the way they want it to. Since Dany can't really control her dragons anymore (there are downsides to owning the first dragons the world has seen in centuries--like, there are no reliable dragon-training resources around), she is not in a good position to defend herself and her people, let alone start being actually constructive. There are also like fourteen different fucking people in or voyaging towards Mereen dead set on marrying her, each one of them completely oblivious to the notion that they may not be the only dude in the world who has had this idea. Tyrion seems to be the only guy in the East not hellbent on wedding or bedding her, which kind of makes me ship Dany/Tyrion from sheer contrariness. They can bond over having both had badly-ending marriages and batshit crazy fathers!
Also, Dany needs to learn more about how batshit crazy her father was, like NOW. Otherwise it's gonna be super ugly when she rides into Westeros all "The only reason anybody would have fought against my father was because they were DIRTY DISLOYAL TRAITORS!" and everyone else is going to be all "Uhh, if you really can't imagine why people might become disloyal to a king after he's roasted their fathers in their own armor and stuff, maybe we don't want you as queen after all." I know she has a lot on her plate but, even after learning that Viserys was a total loon, she still basically accepts his version of Westerosi history and only has some sort of vague notion that maybe she's missed stuff and she should get Barristan to give her the real scoop, like, eventually. She's almost as presumptious and oblivious as her bajillion we-don't-even-realize-we-have-rivals suitors. And she has terrible taste in men.
Speaking of taste in men: I have the biggest literary crush EVER on Jon Snow. Particularly now that he has not only stopped emo-ing around the wall being like "this is not as fun as I thought it was going to be, the other brothers are meeeean to me" but is the Lord Commander and has gone all strategical and multicultural and stuff. Jon has ties to nearly everybody at this point--he has highborn family ties in the Seven Kingdoms, is sword to the Night's Watch, and miraculously still manages to sort of have friends among the wildlings after his undercover adventures earlier. He's come out of the whole Ygritte thing with "I know nothing" as his personal motto, which turns out to be a pretty good idea, because he winds up being the only person constantly challenging his own and everyone else's assumptions, willing to listen to input and ideas from any quarter, and continually hellbent on learning more about whatever they're facing. (Frequently this involves sending Sam to do research, but it also means he ends up hanging on to some dead guys on purpose so that if they come back as wights the Watch can learn more about them.) Jon's role in this book ends up somewhat paralleling Dany's story, in that he is attempting to build peace between the Watch, the wildlings, and Stannis/Melisandre's men, so that they can all fight the Others together. Sadly, most of the time Jon is the only one seemingly capable of remembering about the Others for more than ten seconds at a go; everyone else is too busy bickering over religion and lineage and ancient enmities and 'oo killed 'oo.
There is a thread over at the westeros.org forums that is basically "How Hot Is Jon Snow." It is hilarious.
There are a lot of new POV characters, too, including Ser Barristan Selmy and the Lady Melisandre. Getting inside Lady Melisandre's head was particularly interesting, since she's always been such a big flashy static sort of character. But she seems to have some pretty interesting backstory hidden away...
Speaking of POVs, Martin has in this book started relying a LOT more heavily on a trick he started using when Arya was getting really heavily into the "I have a different identity every time something happens to me" thing, which is naming the POV chapters after nicknames, titles, aliases and descriptors instead of the character's standard name. Each one of Ser Barristan's chapters has a different title; none of them are "BARRISTAN". Arya continues to be CAT OF THE CANALS or THE UGLY LITTLE GIRL or whatever the heck else. This occasionally gets a little annoying; at least the Jon and Dany and Tyrion chapters all continue to be identified as JON and DANAERYS and TYRION. At other times, though, it is super awesome, such as the chapter entitled REEK, because there was a character known as Reek in the second book, but... this is somebody else. And figuring out who while reading the actual text of the chapter was much more satisfying than if it had just been given away in the heading.
I do have to say I feel that Martin went easy on us in terms of the usual Anyone Can Die business; instead, we end this book with several fewer characters dead than I'd thought at the end of Feast for Crows! And even the Big Death at the end that I was dreading seems ambiguous enough that I do not know if that character is actually dead or not. There were a number of really satisfying deaths of people we really wanted to see dead, but no major "good" guys or even really enormously game-changing bad guys like Lord Tywin. However, there are at least five people I was at least mostly sure were dead at the end of the last book who turn out to be not remotely dead at all, and at least one more faked murder during this book, and there's a bit of speculation on the westeros.org board about what other secondary characters could REALLY be more people we thought were deaded years ago. One or two of these Sekrit Identity Reveals needs to fall through (twists within twists!) otherwise it's going to be a little bit too much like a regular fantasy.
On the other hand: heavily implied Frey pies. Lord Wyman Manderly, you are the BEST glutton in literary history.
I hope The Winds of Winter doesn't take another six years; this book was awesome but it didn't move the plot too far forward, and it definitely raised more questions than it answered.
