RARA-AVIS: A Storm of Swords

From: Michael Robison ( miker_zspider@yahoo.com)
Date: 02 Aug 2004


Finally worked my way through Martin's third in his fantasy saga. It weighed in at over 1100 pages in the mass market paperback. I've read similar fantasy sagas by Goodkind and Jordan and they both started sagging by the third offering. This is just a random extraneous thought, but I think one of the problems with the progression of series is that the idiosyncrasies of the authors begin to stick out like a sore thumb.

A STORM OF SWORDS is a beautiful piece, a powerful story with great characters. The material is dark, violent, fast-paced and satisfyingly unpredictable. Last I read of Jordan's series, six or seven thousand pages in, he was continuing to nurture the same half dozen characters that the series started with. No matter how many perils the protagonists face, they always make it through. Contrived. Not so with Martin. Major characters die. Anything can happen.
     

Sad that I'll probably have to wait three years before the next comes out in mass market paperback. I need to dig around for some of Martin's earlier stuff that Terrill recommended.

Without another Martin dungeons and dragons novel to read, I started a dungeons sans dragons novel PILLARS OF THE EARTH by Follett. I've heard a lot of good things about this book.

miker

                
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

--
# Plain ASCII text only, please.  Anything else won't show up.
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Aug 2004 EDT