How good are these books? Are they worth a read?

In the same amount of pages, you could read: The Bible, War and Peace, Infinite Jest, The Lord of the Rings, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mrs Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, and Animal Farm.

Fuck, now I could never read these wonderful books! Curse you, GRRM!

Wow! You're so right in your sarcasm. Duh! People could just spend their time and read all those books PLUS ASOIAF. It's not like people have a finite time, so there's plenty to read anything you want in the world. Golly me, mister, you sure showed me.

We spend a third of our life sleeping, and another quarter eating, shitting, driving to work, showering, and many other mindless, repetitive tasks. Your time isn't that valuable and you could do much worse than read 5 mildly entertaining fantasy novels before old age dementia turns you into a drooling retard.

his writing is super flowery and super long winded .
he will endlessly sperg about some piece of jamies leather armour or some shit .
and he uses the weirdest memes . nobody ever eats breakfast its alway " and arya broke her fast with some dried cunt bread hurdur "
also with introducing jews and tv everything sucks even more r

reeeeeeeeee

7/10 would read why not . just read faggot and stop talking about reading . hur dur

So, why not do better then? You say you can do worse, but why not do better?

They are just porn written by a fat fuck that only got popular because of tits and production value in the tv show.

They were actually really popular before the TV show... which is why it got a TV show in the first place

Joke's on you when you reach for the Bible and suddenly die of the cancer of the duodenum you never knew you had.

If you can get through the Twilight-esque chapters of the books, go for it. I found the first two to be a bit boring, but they do have an interesting story.

I'd have to agree with what this guy says, they're alright but they get tiring because GRR Martin is repetitive.

This to an extent, I enjoyed the first three I think. Writing wasn't amazing, but the world is fairly interesting. I liked it a lot more than the WoT books, which tend to get more praise but are even more cliché

Ditto what other people are saying, read up to like the first third of the fourth book, after that it starts to become fanfiction of itself.

I mean, its peak of lenghty fantasy genre fiction? Lets not mention LOTR, but it doesn't get better than ASoIaF in terms of a modern and fresh take on lenghty fantasy series. And it's what people sometimes want to read, they go looking for 'enormous world of fantasy to invest myself in'. You have this, you have Sanderson, Steven Erikson and perhaps few others, but those are rarely loved by so many like this is.

I never felt 'cringe' or boredom reading these. Writing might be bad in some cases, but storytelling works, worldbuilding works and it doesn't seem terribly lacking in anything, at least not first four books or so. People always say 'first three' while forgetting that 1) Feast for Crows is a fan favorite of many, 2) 5th book is bad, but its probably a transition towards conclusion of the story

>Implying ASOIAF is peak of lengthy fantasy
>Pic related

> 'cringe' or boredom
Dany chapters in a nutshell

I've read the first, got it as a gift, but I cannot imagine myself reading it knowing that I could be reading Dostoyevsky, Aristotle, Joyce...

(OP)
The first three books are god-tier, epic fantasy. I won't say why, just go read them, you'll be glad you did. There's a bit of a drop in quality in Feast of Crows - the story starts to get a bit convoluted and it feels like there's a few too many pointless scenes and padding. Still not too bad though. But Dance With Dragons? A plodding series of vignettes that go nowhere, tedious set pieces which add nothing to the story, the padding turned up to 11 and of course

>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew,

and let us not forget

>When she woke, gasping, her thighs were slick with blood.
>For a moment she did not realize what it was. The world had just begun to lighten, and the tall grass rustled softly in the wind....
>She sat up, afraid that she had soiled herself as she slept. When she brought her fingers to her face, she could smell the blood on
>them. Am I dying? Then she saw the pale crescent moon, floating high above the grass, and it came to her that this was no
>more than her moon blood.

Yeah, don't even give a fuck about Winds of Winter at this point.

holy fucking hell that is horrendous I'm dying

Holy shit I don't think I've ever seen someone so butt mad

What a faggot.

They are not very good. They're not shit, but they're mediocre. I loved them when I was thirteen (when its decent prose stuck out among a sea of genre shitwater), but when you start reading actual literature ASoIaF suddenly becomes the sea of shitwater itself.

That said, no book is worse than any other. They may as well be the same, massive book. Or maybe that's only how I felt because I read them all one after another. I guess that corroborates .
Why the fuck would you read something only "mildly entertaining" when you could read something fully engaging?

Also lol @ all the people complaining about the plot, as if anyone but plebs would ever care about it.

t.random wannabe unique snowflake nobody who never sold nor wrote a single book in his entire life and thinks his opinion is worth anything but shit

Since when did critics need to produce what they critique you faggot

>You can't say Stalin was bad, when was the last time you ran a country
>Being this delusional

Her Storm of Swords chapters were awful because it was mostly just her obsessing about how much she wanted to fuck some mercenary captain.

That entire fucking chapter is her getting the Shits and her period, it's horrible.

First three are worth the read, but Martin's style is really long-winded, 4&5 are a bit of a slog.

FAT
PINK
MAST

MYRISH
SWAMP

Is that chapter hated because its prose is particularly bad or because of the gross content?

I love them. I also love LotR (though they are very different). It's about the worldbuilding, the plotting and politics, and some of the grey characters are really interesting. Though I wouldn't blame anyone for disliking them.

FFC is mostly world-building and showing the carnage of war, but even knowing that it gets pretty ponderous, especially with Brienne. ADWD has some interesting storylines and some boring ones. The book finally sets up the Battle of Ice and Battle of Fire (fan names) at the end of the book, but neither is resolved, which is why I think a lot of people didn't like it.

Because it's basically scat porn and period porn. GRRM is a disgusting old man. I can't even imagine how many smut passages were cut by his editors.

> It's about the worldbuilding
I found his world building to be lacklustre. He just rips of things from the real world and chucks them into his world. Dorne is Spain, right down to having a Moor ethnic invasion parallel, The Dothraki are Mongols right down to the steppe on which they live and expressions they say like blood of my blood. LotR felt like real worldbulding. GRRM's world feels paper thin and unoriginal.

>which is why I think a lot of people didn't like it.
I didn't like it because the whole book is poorly written. GRRM has no idea what he is doing. He's dug himself into a massive hole that he has to dig himself out of and it really shows. That and the prose is the worst of all five books.

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water. When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again.

youtube.com/watch?v=QmKhGqWcJGY

I read the first 4 and I regret it. The plot is completely senseless and it's obvious he has no idea where anything is going.

>worldbuilding

I can't believe Veeky Forums still falls for this meme. Worldbuilding can be fine for setting up a story, but in the fourth and fifth books after thousands of pages you don't need to take a detour to worldbuild. That's just excusing the complete nothing that happens in the fourth and fifth books.

It's pretty obvious that he's completely off the rails and has no idea how to steer the story to the endpoint he came up with. I think the ending might actually be cool but we will not see it. I think we might not even see a next book. The TV show is going to end but it's just ramming forward. GRRM has a way inflated sense of his own writing and wants his obviously shit story to go down as the greatest fantasy epic of all time, so he's going stupidly slow to try and make that happen

dont even listen to the meme that the third one is the best. it's where all of the problems begin; bloated prose, filler bullshit, repetitive bullshit. It's a nightmare to read.

the first two are seriously great though. I'd read them, then just watch the show. Watching the show is like 10 hour of casual watching and you get 80% of the same story, whereas its a lot more time to invest in these books which are 80% shit just to enjoy Stannis more

They're ok. Tiny nuggets of quality lodged between oceans of empty pulp. If you just want entertainment I would recommend them, if you don't want to waste your time I would avoid them.

How is this particular brand of acceptance of mediocrity not anti-intellectualism

Its similar to Rowling.

Started pretty good with a nice bit of world building.

Then we got more specific details and learned they weren't that great at finer details. We started getting more characters and learned they can only write specific sorts of characters and are really bad at most (in Martin's case, he's especially bad at women).

Martin is the new Rowling.

it is anti-intellectualism, and I usually only see it on the reddit boards like /tv/

>Is that chapter hated because its prose is particularly bad or because of the gross content?
Yes. And honestly, such vulgarity is plain not necessary. It adds nothing to the story nor moves it forward in any way.