Reddit mentions of A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 4)

Because none of the others include it, either?

A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R.R. Martin

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Kill the Dead (A Sandman Slim Novel) by Richard Kadrey

And don't go on the reddits until you've finished (if you try, which I totally reccommend; I don't like epic fantasy either and I love the books). The reddits all have spoilers, even /r/gameofthrones.

If you're not into the whole genre, start by watching the show. By the end of the second episode if you're not at least interested in how it goes on, then you're soulless and probably an Other (it's a GoT thing). After the first season, when you need to know more, READ THE BOOKS. DO NOT WATCH THE SECOND SEASON. I've found that it's easier to watch the second season after reading the books, since there is some deviation in the show.

Anyway, after you finish 'A Game of Thrones', 'A Clash of Kings', 'A Storm of Swords', 'A Feast for Crows', and 'A Dance with Dragons', you will finally be ready to watch the second season, and wait with baited breath for 'The Winds of Winter' (warning: links to Wikipedia, which has spoilers for the first five books and beyond), and Season 3 of HBO's Game of Thrones.

And now that I've gone to all the trouble to outline your next month of time, you had better go through with it. Believe me, I'll follow up.

I just started this earlier today. It's pretty good so far. I have A Feast for Crows to read after that.

"Well, unfortunately, any kind of exposure indirectly helps ratings. Of course, nothing will boost ratings more than the show itself being good, but the more people that can be attracted to it, the better chance there is of their ratings staying high or (I'm sure) even increasing."

Well, I don't know anyone who would start watching/reading because they saw a direwolf iphone skin, but since your so doggedly determined that keychains are going to sell the show more effectively than something legitimate like word of mouth, I take it that's how you became a fan. You can have that one, I suppose.


"It sounds like you're still stubbornly defending the idea that he "sold out" without offering enough support for that claim. If you can somehow demonstrate that the literary quality sharply decreased after he shared his writing with other types of ventures, I'll believe it."

I understand you're a newbie to the ASoIaF world, and therefore a little late to the party. I've been there for the 8 years of blog posts about the Giants and Wildcards and of him hocking his latest piece of craphenalia in real time. You haven't. I don't get into this "I've been reading since before it was cool, so I'm better than you" rhetoric alot of the old guard seem to - that's silly - but it does give me better insight to the things we are discussing here than someone who just discovered these were books last summer.

I'm not going to sit here and go through with you every piece of merchandise until you are satisfied. In fact, I won't go through any of them with you other than the things I've already mentioned. It is apparent that you can only find your way to HBO.com

Uh, AGoT ACoK ASoS AFfC ADwD

I don't really have the inclination to get too involved in this so I just gave you the Amazon links. There's a star rating near the book titles. These ratings summarize the quality of the product listed. As you can see the first three books of the series have exceptional ratings: 4.5+ stars, but then starting with Feast and continuing through Dance (current) you see these drop down to 3 stars. There's your demonstration. I'm not going to continue to take you by the hand and point to things as obvious as this.


"There's the Cyanide's track record, which is mostly just a bunch of cycling-related games, and it's pretty clear from the post you linked that GRRM declined Cyanide at the time because he basically felt they were too amateur a studio to be able to do a good job on the game. Years later, (years!) this little company is still determined to do it, especially now that they've opened up another studio and hired enough people to pull the game off"

That's pretty bold to pass that off as fact based on the information in the blog post. We'll go ahead and chalk that up in the "good faith" and "benefit of the doubt" column.

"I think AFfC and ADWD should be considered special cases given what it took to write them."

I don't know exactly what you're intending with this, but no. It shouldn't.

This is the most awesome, well-thought out reply. The scope of my discussion has been mainly targeted for the screen translation.

I don't think these types of edits would make a better book. My list is too much of a "butchers cut", when a fine surgical tool could be used. But have no doubt, this still doesn't change the fact that this book is rated the lowest on this subreddit, as well as sites like amazon. I'll just leave this here:

http://www.amazon.com/Feast-Crows-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553582038/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320074549&sr=8-1

OK, I did something a little different in this review. Soon there will be literally hundreds of reviews for this book, all giving similar reasons why people like or dislike A Feast For Crows. Instead of adding, and probably losing, my voice in amongst the clamour, I've done a bit of mathematics for you. I actually went through the book and noted which characters had chapters of their own and how many pages each of those chapters had, then I figured the numbers out as percentages (yes, I know, I need to get out more). So now, for your literary edification and illumination, I present to you a list of what actually happens in the book, according to my calculations (all rounded off).

CERCEI: 22.5%. That's right, folks, the Lannister Queen has more than one page in five, and nearly one page in four, devoted entirely to her point of view. If you've always wanted to know what goes on in her scheming little mind, then boy, do we have a show for you! Considering that there are thirteen people altogether who get chapter viewpoints of their own, Cercei's 22.5% share means that, on average, everyone else only gets 6.5% each. You could say that Cercei has the lion's share (terrible pun, I know).

BRIENNE: 17.5%. Next on our little list comes the Maid of Tarth. Most of the time we spend with her is on character development, rather than juicy action. Not that there's anything wrong with that at all, but you've been warned. If you were expecting her to become Lara Croft: Tomb Raider reborn, think again. Also, of some small statistical note, more than 60% of the pages in this book are devoted to the female character's points of view. Just so you know.

JAIME: 15.5%. The ever-more-interesting brother, and erstwhile lover, of Cercei continues in his evolution from out-and-out bad guy to, well, kind of a good guy. We're going to have to read the next book to see which way he jumps for sure, but so far he's certainly more inclined towards honesty and honour than he seemed to be in the first couple of books.

SAMWELL: 9%. The first character with less than ten percent of the ink investment is Sam. One of the more down-to-earth minor characters from the previous book, he gets fleshed out a little more here (excuse the pun).

SANSA: 8%. One of the few remaining Starks, and one of only two who get chapters of their own in this book, Sansa is also evolving as a character. In this book she is very slowly starting to show signs of an independence that she heretofore lacked. Of course, with only three chapters of her own, she doesn't show much. Not that she was ever on the front lines of either political intrigue or physical combat.

ARYA: 6% The only other person from House Stark with chapters from her own viewpoint. Arya has always been an interesting character to me. Her moral ambiguity, like Jaime's, is stretched further in this book. I'm a little nervous as to how she'll shape up in the end. At this point, it's a little difficult for me to tell, though I have optimistic expectations.

WHO? WHAT? HUH?: 21.5%. Seven people, some of whom are hardly mentioned, or not mentioned at all, in previous books, have their own chapter or two each in this book. So more than one page in five is from the viewpoint of someone you probably can't remember reading about before. And half the time the same viewpoint doesn't come up again in this book at all.

TYRION, JON, DAENERYS, STANNIS, DAVOS, ETC.: 0%. These characters don't appear at all. We have to tune in to the next episode for updates on their adventures. I wondered about this when I bought the book and saw that the maps at the front only showed Westeros.

So there you have it. If you're here reading reviews because you've gotten halfway through the book, don't like it, and want to see what everyone else thought, then I'd recommend that you keep reading. Slog through a few more pages; it does pick up at around the halfway mark. Although, in my mind, the endings for the various characters are fairly anticlimactic. Nothing is really resolved, unlike the previous books. And it's going to be the same for the next book, apparently, since Martin says that it will only focus on the characters who were expected to appear in this book but didn't.

I've given A Feast For Crows three stars, where the previous books in the series would have each earned at least four stars from me.