That was a good read, love the ending. The parallel timelines are going to take a little getting used to.

Better start rereading the last few books to get ready for the new one.

I shouldn't have read that. I was perfectly content to wait. Was.

If by a little getting used to, you mean a god awful idea that will make reading the book very difficult, I agree.

****ING PWNAGE

Yea you're probably right. I doubt Martin has considered this at all or taken any time to try to fix such a tangled, complicated "knot" of a problem.

Reading Clash of Kings right now. Game of Thrones was fanrastic, though I'm not sure if I should have waited to read it after seeing the series.

I'm not really sure what you mean. It's a pretty inevitable issue. It happened to me just read that little blurb about Jon. One of the things I like the best about Martin's writing is that he doesn't always show you every event first hand. Sometimes characters will tell you a brief rumor/story and you need to catch it in order to know what's going on in other parts of the world.

Since there are no dates, and no real way for us to figure out the order by which events are happening in book 5 in regards to book 4, we are constantly going to be guessing as to what part of the other book the current book is being lived in. I think that sucks, and is a really crappy way to present the information to the reader.

This series is tough enough to follow already since it has like 500 characters, many of which have extremely similar names, and many of which are named after characters previously mentioned in different time periods.

I'm not saying "omg this book is going to suck" or anything. I'm just saying I think the way they chose to write these two books is very sub optimal. I would much rather him release one enormous 1800 page book, or release both books at the same time and make them part 1 and part 2 or something.

For example, I think it's going to be less suspenseful and exciting to hear Jon and Stannis having a conversation that happened months(years?) after the finish of the last book. I mean, if they were to have any conversation with regards to anything happening to pretty much any member of the Lannister family, we will already know whether what they are talking about ends up happening or not, because we've already read that story.

ZB, I believe BJ is referencing the Meereeneese Knot.

Yea. Granted, I haven't read the sample chapters, but as far as I know they are several years old and there have likely been rewrites.

My (sarcastic) point was that Martin is obviously aware of these issues, and it's part of why the book has taken so long. He blogs of the "Meereenese Knot" as amplify said, which seems to be largely what you're talking about - making all of these confusing parallel stories work, especially centered around a bunch of characters converging on the city of Meereen (?) at the same time. It had him stuck for a while, but I think he'll probably get it right in the end.

Question about the excerpt above and my memory having read all the books:

Yes.

You do realize that the chronology of the series was never set in stone, right? There are events in some chapters in Book 2 that take place chronologically after stuff that happens in Book 3. Many of the chapters of Book 4 (particularly the stuff in the Iron Islands) precedes many of the events at the end of Book 3. It's not as if this is anything new, so arguing that the overlapping chronology of Books 4 and 5 will somehow ruin the series seems to me to be rather shallow.

If you actually go read Tolkien, you'll see that he actually did much the same thing in Lord of the Rings. He stays with the same group of characters for a long time, then goes way back in time and revisits that same chronology following different characters. It was probably a bit less obvious because his writing POV was pretty omniscient whereas Martin sticks to strict subjectivity, but go look up any LOTR timeline versus chapters in the books and you'll find that it's incredibly scattershot. For the vast majority of people this doesn't seem to hurt their reading experience.

Except, as previously noted, we've already been doing that, except that you haven't been aware of it because you weren't explicitly made aware of it in the meta sense that the book 4/5 split has already done for you, so you weren't preconditioned into thinking that a complete understanding of the chronology of the books was prerequisite to its enjoyment. Relative timelines don't matter so much when the stories are independent.

It's a fair point of disagreement, except that Martin explicitly made the call that he'd rather tell the whole story for half the characters than do the other thing.

Part of why I think most fans think the way Martin is splitting the books will work is precisely because there actually is a pretty hard divide between the different regions of the story. It's not as if Jon and Cersei are pen pals, and virtually everyone is ignoring what's going on on the Eastern continent. The one exception POV to that is likely to be Davos, and word of his fate is still of questionable reliability which leaves more than a little suspense.

Thanks leapfrog - don't know how I mixed that up!

TxSteve asked if he was mistaken, Horton correctly answered yes.

I think the main problem some people might have with timeline issues is that we have already seen one character in that scene at a later point. I think we have even seen that very same day from his point of view (although I might be mistaken on this).

I think it will be easier for the rest of the book as most chapters will be exclusively with characters we haven't seen in book 3. If they just comment on things that happened in other parts of the world, that won't be so different from what we've had for the rest of the series.

As usual Shaffer is dominating this thread.

I should stop reading this thread though since I'm rereading the series again and I've forgotten a lot of the stuff that happens (even though I've read it twice already! It's been like 6 years since last read through though). I reread the series right before Feast came out, and now I'm rereading again in anticipation of Dance coming out soon. I hope I'm not doing this too soon though!

Honestly i'm gonna wait til the ****er is in my hands before i start rereading the series again...to make sure there isn't any break between Feast and Dance.

and yea thanks Shaffer for all the great info itt.

I did that when Brandon Sanderson took over Robert Jordan's series.

I just did a quick refresher read through that took about 6 months.


Think I should be able to knock these books out in a couple or three weeks.

Heh, back in the day I used to reread The Wheel of Time and try to time it with the new book coming out, but I abandoned that around Book 7 as there was only so much braid-tugging and folding-of-arms-under-breasts that I could stand (Jordan was in many ways a master storyteller but just not that great of a writer IMO). The weird thing about ASOIAF for me is that I don't really need any impetus for a reread. They're like the literary equivalent of "The Wire"; no matter how many times I plow through them, I pick up so many more details that I'd somehow missed.

I agree. If, years ago, Jordan had sent his notes to Sanderson and allowed him to put the books out, the combination could have been astounding. And the series would've been complete 10 years back.

Rand al'Thor > Jamie Lanchester