Just finished George R.R. Martin's last book last night, and I must say, he is the best fantasy writer I have read in ages! Besides Robert Jordan who I know now spans 12 books and has was unable to fully finish his last book, no other writer has gotten to me this way with his storytelling techniques. As an artist myself, what I respect in him the most (and partially detest as a reader) is his ability to handle that many main characters and be open-handed OR underhanded enough to kill them off as easily as they come into the story. It also seems to underline how the game of thrones really works in which one never knows who is a 'main' character in a story for long as it might in real life. There is something real in his stories that makes it so believable and all the more intriguing and mesmerizing. There are real emotions and real reactions, real personality and I wonder if this comes about from someone who has had a full experience with life and experience with many people, I feel that this series might be a culmination of all that experience and it is because of that, that makes it so beautiful. The cliffhanger was horrible at the end of the 5th book and knowing that the 5th book had just been released which meant that the 6th book was all the more distant from my near future made it bittersweet at finishing up this book!
I tried go into a new fantasy book today by Beth Bernobich, titled 'Passion Play', and something in a line one of the characters said in the 2nd page just got to me, and I realized that the book I was reading was not to say on a lower tier but not at the level that George Martin has achieved to date. The other book that was similar to the Game of Thrones series for me was the Kushiel's Scion series by Jacqueline Carey in which it has a deep underlying theme of kingdoms though not in the sense of fighting for thrones, everything in that series was a lot more subtle. Sigh, I think I might need to go into non-fiction for a while....
