A book series you may end up really liking...

[DaveSW]

A Song of Ice and Fire.

Book 1 is called A Game of Thrones.

Has many of the same plot elements as FFT, but the one that sticks out is that both are medieval historical fantasies that draw heavily from the War of the Roses.  Simply amazing stuff, this series, I highly suggest anyone and everyone check it out.

Because the books recently became a show on HBO, you can pick up the first book for only around 5 US dollars.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

I picked it up a while ago and read it, but it's really fucking irritating.  For convienence, I'll divide my critisicm into two categories, literary and story.

*Literary*

The writer has maybe half a dozen tricks that he uses THE ENTIRE FUCKING SERIES.  Chief among these tricks is ending a chapter (or section or whatever the fuck) just before any real action or major giveway dialog occurs.  Every fucking chapter is a cliffhanger.  Really?  It gets old after the first 200 pages.

The other trick he uses is, instead of picking up where he left off and writing the really interesting parts, he just drops us into whatever's going on (which is usually nowhere near as interesting as what was promised during that characters previous POV section) and eventually has the characters mention - offhandedly, of course - whatever that interesting thing was.  Don't get me wrong; it's fine to start a story like this, but he does this for almost every chapter for THE ENTIRE FUCKING SERIES.  I can think of maybe two dozen examples where he doesn't.

So the entirety of this series is the equivalent of watching Ramza fart around in formation, and having the battles fought offscreen by AI.  Fuck yeah.

*Story*  MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, DO NOT READ AHEAD IF YOU EVER WANT TO FINISH THESE BOOKS!

spoiler

Almost everyone dies.  And not in a good way, fighting the big bad and sacrificing their lives.  To make another analogy, this series is equivalent to Ramza catching the pox from a whore in Dorter and being bedridden for the remainder of the game, until he finally goes senile and is killed of by Dycedarg.  And then resurrected by the Magical Mystical TOTALLY NOT A DEUS EX MACHINA monk, so he can go off on some inane fucking errand which will seemingly never fucking end, or accomplish anything.  It's an exercise in frustration.  Whenever something remotely interesting comes up (like, say, a political assasination), he skips all the good stuff so we can watch him do a character study on a mannish Agrias Oaks wannabe.  And then once we get used to that, he throws some supernatural elements in, and then snatches them out of our hands before we can do more than sniff them.  He literally can't decide if he wants to write a uber-realistic literary deconstruction of mediaval fantasy or if he wants to write a fantasy-horror novel.  E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. suffers because of this.  It's not bitterly disappointing, like some horror I read; it's more of a "I can't believe I wasted 40 hours reading this shit" experience.  A buy a game on friday and return it on monday experience.

IIRC, the writer also wrote a bunch of crappy Outer Limits episodes in the 80's or 90's, and it shows.

[Cheetah]

I'm with Dave, this series is incredible, brutal, but very well done. I am currently going through the recently released fifth book and it appears to be holding up the same high standard. The multiple levels of intrigue and deep characters really add to the realism of the story given it's fantasy setting. Definitely a rather mature series though.