Four by the Twelfth: An Update

As my week and a half draws to a close and with the final episode of A Game of Thrones due to air tonight I thought I'd give you a little update on where I am in my 'quest' to re-read all of A Song of Ice and Fire before the 12th July.

I'm deep into A Feast for Crows and will have comfortably nailed it by the aforementioned date.  I'd forgotten how meandering and at times down right plodding book four is, with almost none of the violence and heartbreak of A Storm of Swords.

My week off may have begun with Isle of Wight Festival but the last two days of it have been primarily focused on reading and drinking.  Lovely.  But tonight I'll be sat watching the final episode of the TV show, hoping that the crucial last five minutes aren't a fuck up.  A lot depends on those closing moments, believe me.  Get them right and you'll have an audience hungry for A Clash of Kings, fuck it up though and there will be a whole lot of online bitching.  Mostly from me.

Whatever happens tonight the first three books have been an absolute joy to plough through again.  Their density perpetuated with spikes of wonderful evil and more double crossing than I could keep count of (and I can count really high) has been impossible to put down.

Book four has its flaws with the introduction of new characters in an already well populated story and at times it's hard to care for them.  It lacks some of the really big players too and loses some of the forward motion because of that.  You start to fear for Martin as he tries to bring all this together in the final two books once we've had the other half of A Feast for Crows in A Dance With Dragons later this summer.   It's still a cracking book though and come July we go back to The Wall.

Winter is coming.