Gods be good, why would any man ever want to be king?

In my last review, I said I was done reviewing all of my 2014 reads. I was wrong. I still have The Collector to review. Except, that happens to be one of the books I packed up and sent to my mom's (I hope...) so yeah. Writing a review will be difficult. I will get to The Collector eventually. In the meantime...

When I read A Game of Thrones people said "The book is long BUT as soon as you read it you're going to want to fly through the rest of the series. It's so good, you have to know what happens next." I read the book back in November/December. Of 2012. So yeah, that didn't really hold true for me. I liked the series but I didn't NEED to know what happened next. I picked up the second book A Clash of Kings the following May when I had some long plane rides that would require entertainment. Again, I liked it but wasn't really like "YES I NEED MORE OF THIS RIGHT NOW." If anything, I was less ready to jump into the world of Westeros again.

Finally this December I started reading the third book, A Storm of Swords and I've finally hit the "Holy shit, I know that book was 1,200 pages but DAMMIT I WANT MORE." You got me, sir. I surrender. I'm hooked now. It may have taken a little longer than with those who were fans from the first book, but the third book A Storm of Swords has done it. Well done.

I'm not even going to attempt a real review, even though I'm actually writing a good amount of this not too long after finishing the book (as opposed to most of my other reviews which are now like 2 months behind). But let's be honest, I'm not going to convince anyone to read the books or not at this point. We are something like 5,000 pages into the series now, so you're either in it or you aren't. I will just say that it's been awhile between reading A Clash of Kings and this one because after Clash I was sort of eh on the books. I figured I'd keep going but (clearly) I wasn't concerned with starting up again right away. Clash was a LOT of battle scenes which I tend to skim through. Sorry, I just don't care, no matter how hard I might try. This one however, despite taking me over a month to finish, when I got to the end I was SO MAD there weren't more pages to read. Because 1,200 wasn't enough?

Storm is definitely my favorite of the series so far. I have been warned that book four moves away from the characters you know and love (well, I mean, those that are left...) to introduce a whole bunch of new characters because GREAT, I didn't have enough names to remember already. But I know I'm going to read it because dammit, I need to know what's going to happen. Hell, I already bought the next book. So it will be coming soon.

So consider the above my review. Everything below is a series of thoughts I had while reading the book that really only makes sense if I was doing a readalong (and for the record, I would totally consider doing a readalong of this, even though it would mean starting these stupid 5k pages over again, because OMG there is so much to talk about) so not only will there be spoilers below, but it's probably not going to be a bunch of gibberish unless you've read the books. So if you haven't read the books, or just don't want to hear my blabbering,

GIF Rating:

Now, let the rambling spoilers begin.

Here's the thing. I understand opinions are subjective. But if Dany isn't your favorite character, well,

She is the best, and I was disappointed to hear that (at least based on the TV show) she will likely be in the next book a lot less. Unacceptable.

As you probably know (if you read this far, what with that spoiler warning and all) this book includes the Red Wedding, which the internet freaked out about when the show got to that point. I knew what the Red Wedding was because of said internet freak out, though I didn't realize it was this book until Alice mentioned it. However, I think I would have guessed something similar was going to happen even without any information because GRR lays it on pretty thick with the whole "If we are guests in his house OF COURSE nothing bad will happen to us! Because we're guests. And tomorrow we have all of these plans that will pretty much solve every problem. Which we will totally get to because nothing bad is going to happen at this wedding. Because we're guests so they can't do anything. As we've mentioned. Repeatedly."

The Starks NEED to stop sending their direwolves off. And maybe pay more attention when the wolves start freaking out over seemingly nothing because the wolves know what's up. And yet they repeatedly send the wolves off or are like 'No, stop growling at that clearly innocent person who won't do anything to me. Cos guests."

People (meaning random Tumblr gifs) keep talking about how awesome Sansa is and how she was super meek and lame in season 1/book 1 but now she's all smart and badass in her own subtle way. I was really hoping we'd be getting that Sansa by now. Or maybe that's just the arc of TV show Sansa cos book Sansa is not living up to my expectations. She is still meek and terrified and very trusting of all the wrong people. But I do like her more than I did in the earlier books.

I am having some suspension of disbelief issues. I can go with the dragons and the fighting and the giants riding mammoths and all that jazz. But the ages of the Stark kids? No, I'm sorry. Rob is not only 16, Jon is WAY older than 14, Dany is definitely older than 13, there's no way Sansa's only 12. I'm sorry, George R.R., but no. I do not buy this.

THESE ARE NOT TINY TEENS

I will continue to think of them as their show counterpart ages, even if I've only seen 1/2 of season 1. And I will eventually watch more of the show.

I'm happy this book FINALLY decided to do something about the white walkers because the earlier books seemed very unconcerned. They were all busy worrying about stupid things (King wars and whatnot) instead of the intelligent zombies hanging out right outside their stupid wall.

I could probably think of a million other random things (WHICH IS WHY WE NEED A READALONG OF THIS) but I'll stop now.

Title quote from page 280

Martin, George R. R. A Storm of Swords. Bantam Books, 2003. Kindle.