Game Of Thrones – Books 2-5 Review (No spoilers, I promise)

Well. I’ve finally finished.

It took over my life. I read constantly – in bed, in the bath, on the tube, while I was supposed to be watching TV…I read for a good solid month, I would say. I started speaking in a strangely old fashioned manner and kind of forgot that Winterfell and Kings Landing weren’t real places. But I’ve finally finished reading the Game Of Thrones.

I now feel slightly bereft and am not sure what to do with myself. It’s a bit like the end of a relationship. I feel like I can’t possibly launch into another book series so soon; it would be like breaking up with somebody one day and leaping into a new relationship the next day – just all wrong. I don’t want the relationship to be over. I want to ring up George R R Martin and beg and plead with him to speed up the release of book number 6 (tenuously scheduled for 2014, but as he’s left up to seven years between books previously, I’m not holding my breath).

When I first reviewed Game Of Thrones Book 1 (here) I mentioned a few annoying niggles I had with the books – like the author’s love of killing people off, for example – and don’t get me wrong, I’ve found a couple more of those. An annoying propensity for throwing in a sudden twist, making everything go wrong when it appears to be finally going right. Good guys coming last. A slightly James-Bond-esque tendency for certain characters to escape their fate in increasingly unfeasible manners. There are chapters on end – even one entire book, in fact – where nothing really seem to happen at all, and there are far, far too many paragraphs dedicated to describing snow.

But it doesn’t matter, and in fact as the series goes on you start to enjoy these little tropes – even look for them. The series is fantasy, and the apparently pointless chapters all add something little which has meaning going forward – like tiny pieces of a giant puzzle. Either that, or they’re false signs, and that’s half the fun. Just when you’re convinced you know exactly what’s going to happen, something occurs to throw a spanner in the works. I’ve never read a book quite so unpredictable – it’s brilliant.

I’m now going to allow myself to watch Series 2 and 3 of the TV show, which I’d banned myself from watching until the reading was all done. I really enjoyed Series 1, so I’m now anxiously awaiting my Amazon order in anticipation of a weekend spent with the curtains drawn and a pizza…

Have any of you read the whole series? What did you think? Don’t leave any spoilers in the comments – we don’t want to ruin it for everyone else (not that we know how it ends…!)