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I really want to read the series, but the wait between books is too long. I will devour them once the last book is released, but trying to remember plotlines and character motivations for five years between book releases is too much for my brain to handle.

you can always reread :)

Pat Benatar, loved her back when I was in high school. She rocked my world.

Hell is for halflings.

I get the impression, for whatever reason, that there are Wheel of Time people and ASOIAF people. I picked the series up on the advice of some people on the WOT fan board I used to read; I got through book 2, but really found myself with no desire to keep going. The plot was morbid and depressing and I found myself unable to like a single one of the characters in the books. But if you like them, awesome.

Was going to write a note on the Mat-Tylin thing, but I'll put it in the other thread, where it belongs.

Lost_In_Translation: Sometimes I feel like I'm not reading the same books everyone else did. I don't mind death doom and despair in books, but only when there's some point to it; I sometimes get the feeling that GRRM is saying, "Look at me! I'm cool and sophisticated and all my characters are dead!" I can't bring myself to care about any of his characters; none of them are sympathetic and none of them are interesting, with the exception of the guy who dies in the first book. I really just never found any reason to care about any of them.

I guess the short is that if I want to read about a bunch of seriously morally flawed idiots I don't like, care about, or respect getting people killed and getting themselves and everyone else into trouble, there's always the Times.

Really, I can't say anything too specific because it's been years; but I never found much of anything in the books to like. The whole "no one is really a villain" thing is interesting but doesn't really work for me, because it means no one is really a hero and I like reading about heroes. If I don't like any of the characters in the books, there's just nothing to keep me engaged.

I've actually read the series before, but it's been a couple years so I felt like I was ready for a reread. They actually seem more powerful knowing what comes later; I feel like yelling "Stop, stop! You're headed for disaster!" at all the characters. It was so, so hard to read Dany's scenes in the first book, knowing how it ended, and of course I started bawling as soon as I got there.

It's hard to compare SoIaF and WoT, since aside from "epic fantasy" they're going for completely different things. Medieval realism vs true fantasy, world with iron-hard limits vs world where all the rules are changing, shades-of-grey moralism vs straight-up good guys and bad guys. Where they overlap, it's a matter of personal taste; I think Martin handles political scheming and military stuff much better, but Jordan does better with creating a world that's fun to play around in.

The books are pretty grim at times, to be sure, and I can see how for a lot of people they're just not fun. But I think the moral shading of the characters is excellent. Sure, there's no real heroes, but that's how it is in life, and the best characters are the ones with flaws. Rand and Ned Stark both end up causing harm to the people around them because of their grim adherence to duty; Mat and Davos both rise to the battle challenge when it appears but long to return to an easier life. I like that Martin takes it further and acknowledges that even villains have good and bad in them too, and things that the reader can identify with -- I can empathize with Cersei's frustration at not being born a man, or Theon's desperate attempts to win his family's approval, even as I'm wholeheartedly rooting for them to meet nasty and swift ends. And (although I haven't gotten far enough in the reread to get to his parts yet) the way Martin develops Jaime is an absolute one-hundred-percent perfect way to do an antihero. I also think Martin's willingness to put his characters in harm's way makes the books so much more gripping. When Rand gets into mortal danger, the reader can pretty much assume that he's going to find some way out of it, to make it to the final book. In SoIaF, nobody's safe, and so I'm on the edge of my seat.

Although you can't really say that nobody is a hero, because Arya is totally awesome.

I think I'd have to give Martin the edge in terms of creating good female characters in general -- Catelyn and Sansa and Arya and Cersei and Brienne and Dany are all tough and smart, and all in totally different ways. Jordan seems to default to women sniffing and sniping at men and obsessing about their dresses (although Egwene as the Amyrlin Seat was getting good, and Aviendha was different).

But like I said, the two series are going for completely different things. So there's a limit to how much you can critique them before it just turns into personal taste.

Hell, it's been a week since the last post. Why not revive the thread as a Pat Benatar discussion?

I wish I had her voice and the bone structure to pull off her haircut.