May 6th

Day 127
16.230 read, -0.188
A Game of Thrones 498-627

I am *finally* less than one book behind my goal! :D  I'm now only 188 pages away from where I should be, which is the best I've done since January!  Hopefully, I'll be caught up in a few days, sometime this week.

A Game of Thrones is going well.  It's certainly readable and the world-building and overall plot arcs are absorbing, and I like how he cleverly is constructing a fantasy epic but building it around a murder/mystery/thriller premise of who killed Jon Arryn/who's really the bad guys.

But, I find his writing style somewhat mediocre really.  He gets a pass for having a fantasy world where it's harder to criticise the "realism" of it, but I still don't feel like the characters always stay so true to themselves and instead are manipulated by the writers to further the plot.  For instance, would Catelyn really decide, after meeting with Robb, to make way for Riverrun to see her father and brother instead of going back to Winterfell where her poor crippled boy has been left alone?  I don't think so.  Or, though it didn't happen, would Ned have really had the ship containing his daughters stop at Dragonstone, where he has no ideas of the intentions or loyalties of Stannis?  And I could go on and on but those are some recent examples.

Also, I feel like he tries hard to infuse good and bad into certain characters but he often lapses into caricatures.  Prime example - Viserys.  I mean, really?  Even given his inbred lineage and his unquenchable thirst for power and the different world, it still comes off as unreal that he'd be so stupid.  He's really more of a caricature than a real person.

Anyway, those who love the books will probably easily disagree with those examples and quickly explain them away, but I could give much lengthier lists if I were inclined to.  But this is not a bad book.  In fact, for fantasy, I'd say it's a pretty good book and I only notice those things because otherwise it's good.

I can't think of this as high literature, not even just contained to the fantasy realm. Instead, I think of it as more of a grand sprawling soap opera epic with mysteries, twists, turns and cliffhangers, and thought of as a soap opera, it's immensely entertaining.  Let me contrast that with say The Name of the Wind, which I thought was fantastic.  That book has philosophy and some great messages and such wrapped around a great story.  This book doesn't have any philosophy or messages really except the ordinary good vs evil with some in-between characters too.