WoT Ten Years Later: Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers

If A Crown of Swords is the first WoT book that I bought, A Path of Daggers (October 1998 publication) is the first WoT book that I bought in hardcover, on its release date.  I read the first seven volumes while I was finishing up my MA in History at the University of Tennessee in 1997, but this volume I purchased while I was halfway through my 16 month teacher education/student teaching coursework.  I remember using the internet in the university computer lab to look for several release dates for books I had a vague interest in and I saw when The Path of Daggers would be released in a few weeks, so I used some of my student loan money that I had at the time (between classwork and my required 60 hours of classroom observation, no way was I going to be able to hold even a part-time job) and bought the book in a local mall.

When I first read it in 1998 and again when I re-read it in 2000, I did not find the book to be quite as poor as some of the online comments have since made it out to be.  Since I'm one of those poor benighted souls that never have worshiped at the altar of Mat Cauthon, I guess I did not "miss" his presence in this novel as much as others did.  This is not to say that I found The Path of Daggers to be a "good" novel.  Back then, I thought of it as being more of an "incomplete" novel, one that contained some interesting points and relatively fewer examples of sniffing and skirt smoothing compared to the previous four volumes, but one that ultimately lacked anything in the way of a strong concluding chapter or cliffhanger.  The various subplots just stopped, with little in the way of interest outside of a vague curiosity about Rand's.

Ten years later, my opinion on the novel has changed only a little bit.  Surprisingly as it may be for those who may expect me to view each novel from #7 to #10 or maybe #11 dimmer than the preceding one, I found The Path of Daggers to be relatively inoffensive in terms of its prose compared to the previous three volumes.  Although way too much time was still wasted on outlining forgettable minor characters (or rather, the clothing that they were wearing) or on repeating details that had already been introduced and discussed several times in previous volumes, the frequency of each was less than compared to the previous three novels.

I found the Ebou Dar setting of the past two novels to be at best dull and at worst the setting for some of the worse Jane Austen pastiches that I had read in some time.  As I stated in my previous commentary,  the comedy of manners routine became stale rather fast and never was it as monotonous as in the Ebou Dar scenes.  In The Path of Daggers, finally the action shifts away from Ebou Dar and finally the Bowl of the Winds is used to change the weather from an eight-month summer suddenly to the middle of winter.  In showing this and the aftermath of that scene, Jordan plays the characters much more seriously than he did in A Crown of Swords and that alone made the scenes with Nynaeve and Elayne barely bearable.  Alliteration!

But if the Bowl of the Winds subplot was finally resolved after the third novel in which it was mentioned, the other subplots barely show much in the way of progress, with one notable exception.  Egwene's rebel forces are still slowly trekking across the countryside toward their long-awaited showdown with the Tower Aes Sedai.  Not much happens other than the expected "Egwene uses her Wise Ones-taught mad skillz and shows the necessary strength of character to start gaining the upper hand in her battle for control of the rebel Hall."  Perrin wanders about a bit in the Southwest, gaining a regal liege and eventually going even more emo than he had been in the previous two novels.  The Tower Aes Sedai is a mess and only toward the end is a solution discovered for that mess.

And then there are the chapters featuring the Dragon Reborn.  Perhaps it is a bad sign of just how bloated the other, purportedly secondary subplots have become with the prophesied savior of the world doesn't enter the picture until almost exactly halfway into the film.  Leads a semi-successful campaign to stop the Seanchan, discovers the cost of hubris, and then mopes about a bit, trying to become harder than Chuck Norris with a stiffy.  These were actually some of the more well-done chapters.  I have said in passing that I think Jordan does a better job with Rand's character than he does with the others (I know those who do enjoy the antics of Mat will disagree with my assessment here, but your opinion shall not sway mine), in large part because of the way he attempts to show the traumas that affect the Chosen One.  The lack of connection with others, the growing inability to laugh or to shed tears, the anger and frustration - all of these are shown to be developing inside of Rand's character.  While Jordan again is guilty of overplaying this and trying to describe it in too much detail rather than trusting in the dialogue and in the character's internal monologues (dialogues?) with himself (and Lews Therin, depending how you want to interpret that "character"), on the whole, this is the one character that develops appreciably in this volume.

Sadly, just like I found it to be on my initial reads, The Path of Daggers was a very "incomplete" novel.  Nothing really is resolved.  There is the sense that this is more a "moving the pieces" novel, which would be fine if said novel would display interesting character development, but outside of Rand's and, to a lesser degree, Egwene's, not much changes within the characters.  A few things are begun, more subplots are introduced, but there is little sense of anything really being furthered here.  This book reads as though it were maybe 3-5 chapters in a long Dickens novel rather than anything approaching a suitable complete volume of a multi-volume work.  That being said, at least there was a slight improvement in the prose by the subtraction of so many of those damn irritating attempts at comedy.  The comedy elements are still present, but thankfully are much reduced, making this a slightly more enjoyable for me to read than the previous three.  Now to go deep into Winter's Heart and see if I can survive the Crossroads of Twilight which await me.

SOIAF re-read project: George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

In my commentary on George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, I noted that I had found in my 2000 and 2002 reads of the second volume, A Clash of Kings, that the story lagged in comparison to the first and (to a lesser extent) third volumes.  What I recall thinking back then is that while Martin continued developing characters and events throughout the novel, that there was this sense that the timing was off.  In addition, with much of the action situated around nobles and their machinations, it was difficult to get a sense of why the story's events should have any greater import than just stating baldly, "oh, and a bunch of nobles fought for their honor or the honor of their liege lords and many people died while the river ran red with their blood."  As I believe I have said before, political maneuverings in fiction, particularly speculative fiction, rarely hold my interest, in large part because they seem to be pale carbon copies of actual events, many of which I had to study while earning my degrees.

But if time is said to heal most wounds, perhaps it can also be said that time (and experience) can alter a reader's perspective.  No, I am not going to argue that A Clash of Kings is superior to A Game of Thrones, nor will I take back my earlier opinion that the book felt a bit bloated at times.  I am willing to admit, however, that this novel contains more interesting scenes than the Battle of Blackwater Bay/King's Landing.  Considering how antipathetic I can be toward "battle scenes," it was a good thing that I found the characters and their situations to be better than I had earlier remembered them being.

Although I am not going to search diligently through both books to make certain, I don't believe there are any major new PoV characters outside of the Onion Knight, Davos Seaworth, whose purpose is to provide some insight into what is taking place in the King Stannis sphere of plot operations, and Theon Greyjoy, whose actions show two different theaters of the spreading war.  The rest of the PoV characters pretty much occupy the same areas and perspectives as they did in the earlier novel.  While this approach of having at least one and often two PoV perspectives in each theater of operations allows for a multiplicity of insights into what is transpiring among the nobles, there is the negative consequence of more page space being required to develop each of these character/subplot arcs than what might have been the case if Martin had used a multi-PoV chapter approach that condensed what each PoV was experiencing. 

While eight to ten years ago I might have found the trade-off of sacrificing character/situation detail for brevity to be enticing, this time I am not so certain that alternate approach would have generated as many benefits to offset the increased narrative power once all of these numerous parts click into place.  There is, after all, something to be said in favor of a slower buildup than what might be the course for most epic fantasies.  But this is not to excuse those moments where it seemed instead of there being a gradual but swelling rise toward a huge climactic scene, that there was a sense of things hanging a bit too long, of too much being revealed in too laborious of detail. 

Surprisingly, considering how much I enjoyed his chapters during my first two reads, some of the Tyrion chapters lagged the most for me during this re-read.  At times, it felt as though too much of his resentments, his lusts, and his plans were revealed.  Although I would be hard pressed to suggest how Martin could have done it any differently, I got the sense that too much was revealed in the scene between Tyrion and the alchemists, as the turning point in the naval battle of Blackwater Bay felt a bit too predictable and devoid of real shock and awe (well, as much as could be for a third read of the book).  More numerous and perhaps of greater weight when considered together, were all the references to Tyrion's cock.  If I can note my irritation at how there is too much repetition of character comments, quirks, and so forth in the WoT series, it is only fair to note that Tyrion's cock received too much air-time (intentional pun?  Not really).

Although I believe it is worse in the next volume, the amount of feasting in this novel did numb me to what was occurring around those feasts.  Yes, I know there are occasional feasts held by the local nobility, but between that and the tournaments (thankfully abbreviated in this volume), and it is more difficult for me to keep my focus on what is occurring.  These, along with the above-mentioned Tyrion scenes, were perhaps the worst parts of the novel.

However, I should note that an earlier opinion of mine regarding this book in particular and the series as a whole has shifted somewhat.  I remember thinking that as the series progressed, there was less and less of a focus on presenting the "common people's" views of what was transpiring.  While it would have been nice to have a one-off PoV chapter from a denizen of Flea Bottom or a common soldier in one of the armies, Martin did at least attempt to show more of what was transpiring around the four kings' struggles than just the leaders' perspectives.  Arya's chapters grew on me during this re-read, although her character still disturbs me as much as it did when I first read this book and the following.  In a way, that is a compliment to Martin's characterization skills, as Arya's transformation into a borderline sociopath in this novel was deftly done.  It is in sections such as hers (and to a lesser extent, the Daenerys and Jon chapters) where Martin's choice of utilizing PoV chapters, with limited third-person perspectives, appears to be the correct decision.  I was engaged more with these three PoVs than I was with the others, which may be more telling about me as a reader than about Martin as a writer.

So while the pace was slow and at times too full of padding for my liking, overall I found myself more engaged with A Clash of Kings than I recall ever being with my first two reads.  Although there are some problematic issues surrounding his PoV chapter approach (and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these structural issues are behind at least some of the delays with the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons), on the whole, the story works because the characters feel more well-rounded and their motives, regardless of how despicable they might be in today's societies, have a sense of justification to them that makes it hard to be completely unsympathetic to the more villainous characters or, conversely, completely sympathetic to the better-natured ones.  It is an intricately-told tale, one that improved for me upon this re-read.  Now on to A Storm of Swords, which I hope to finish by Wednesday evening.

Looking back on certain blogger's Best of 2007 lists

Was curious just now about how much tastes can change over time and how much overlap there can be when a moment is captured through the lens of various people.  Did a quick search through the blogs in my blogroll that I was certain were active in 2007 and I found six Best of 2007 lists, as well as the series of posts I made that year.  Thought it'd be neat to see what I'd change and where certain authors/books stood in 2007:

My lists, broken down into many posts covering various categories

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist

Neth Space

Adventures in Reading

Fantasy Book Critic

Graeme's Fantasy Book Review

The Wertzone


Looking at my own list, I wouldn't replace any of them, but I would add Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow, Theodora Goss's In the Forest of Forgetting for the story collection section, and Christopher Barzak's One for Sorrow in the debut novel category.  None of my overall Top 3 would change, that's for certain and there would be only minor shuffling among the rest of the Top 12 (13 now). 

Take a glance at my lists and the ones that other bloggers did back in 2007.  Which books do you think were the strongest then, as of today?  Have your opinions of these authors shifted over time?  If so, how?

WoT Ten Years Later: Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords

As I believed I mentioned somewhere earlier in one of my commentaries, A Crown of Swords was actually the first WoT book that I read.  I was in the midst of my MA exams (I want to say I purchased the book during the week between my MA writtens and my MA orals) and I wanted something light to read.  I was doing my usual late-night grocery shopping when I thumbed through the books in the display.  One of them looked somewhat promising.  Said it was one of several books by this author (I should note that this was the alternate paperback cover that didn't feature any of Darrell Sweet's artwork, or else I might not have ever picked up the book in the first place), but no indication if this series was a bunch of stand-alones or part of an ongoing serial.  Since it was only $7 or so and I was bored, I picked it up and read it the next day/night or two between my readings on the Second International.

I remember finding the thing to be a sort of mystery (obvious, since there were six volumes before it), but I was quickly able to figure out the particulars based on the repetitions within the text.  It was a nice antidote to the heavier historical monographs that I had been reading, so I decided to buy the first six volumes and read them in order (once I was in a bookstore a week later and could browse the SF/F shelves, almost for the first time, for this mostly-unknown-to-me author).

I believe I re-read it a couple more times between early November 1997 and the autumn of 2000.  None of those subsequent re-reads appealed to me as much as the initial read did and I found myself thinking even worse of this novel after finishing my first re-read of it in nearly 10 years.  And yet, there weren't quite as many "Oh hell, why did I decide to re-read this and to do so without skipping paragraphs at a time?" moment as there were in the previous two volumes.  Of course, this is probably due to the fact that A Crown of Swords was nearly 150 pages shorter than its predecessors. 

Although I noticed this occurring to some extent in the earlier novels (and especially in the fifth and sixth volumes), there was an ungodly amount of attempts to have situational comedy tropes within this novel.  I have no problems with comedies of manners; Henry Fielding's 18th century classic, Tom Jones, is one of my all-time favorite novels.  But this novel was overloaded with these attempts to juxtapose the serious with the ridiculous.  It would have been one thing if Jordan had interspersed these moments better or have more variations on the theme of showing how little people understand each other (and how that lack of understanding is the inverse of how confident they are about their abilities to understand others).  But ohhhhh noooo....Jordan just had to bludgeon the reader throughout the entire narrative and virtually every single subplot with near-countless repetitions of the same type of character interaction and character response.  It felt ham-handed and rather numbingly dull after a while.

Related to this was the sense of stagnation that I got when reading the PoVs of several characters.  Despite Jordan's attempts to portray some development, several of the main characters felt as though they had been stuck in a rut for the past 3-5 novels and that they would still react in the same oft-ridiculous fashions. From having Elayne and Nynaeve screw up yet once again in negotiating with another to them somehow making it through, to the PoV females universally treating the male characters, especially Mat and to a lesser degree Rand and Perrin, like a rotting skunk carcass (and the males beginning their emo-like stages of handling this), to the tinny EVILness of the Black Ajah and the surviving Forsaken, it just all felt as though I were watching a bunch of episodes of Scooby-Doo Mysteries back-to-back-to-back-to-back and seeing the same structures repeating themselves.  Combine that with the overdoing of the comedy and I found myself struggling to engage with the story.

The storylines here are more like post-coital moments - slow, languid, with not much sense of urgency after the storm had broken, which I suppose is an ironic sentiment to have, considering the talk near the end of the novel about a storm that was coming.  There's barely any resolutions to speak of, outside of Rand and the Forsaken Sammael (I will not eat it with a fox or in a box, Sam-I-Am!).  The Bowl of the Winds subplot is left unresolved, as it still hasn't been used at the novel's end and the weather is still screwy there.  Egwene is still fighting for control of the rebel forces and the march continues.  A cliffhanger or two is interspersed as well.

Oh, I'm certain that fans of the series will argue that there are some key developments.  To a small extent, they would be correct.  More prophecies are uttered, the Hero moves toward becoming like the Arthurian Fisher King, and chaos is being reaped.  If anything, the baddies' real dastardly plan is revealed here, as the remaining Forsaken, power-hungry and thus blinded by their greed and ambition, are just fronts for a nasty shell game, where the objective is really to unravel reality and to spread chaos throughout the land in order to smooth the road for the Dark One to burst forth.  That is actually an interesting twist to the series so far and I would applaud it, if only Jordan could have created a more plausible rationale in the earlier novels.  Here, it just feels a bit stuck on. 

The usual complaints about the writing and the prose are again raised upon this latest re-read.  I've already mentioned before how grating I find continual repetition and when it is coupled with a limited range of adjectives for character actions, this becomes magnified.  Jordan never really was a good sentence crafter, but here it felt as though he were using sentences of character and clothing description to cover up perceived deficiencies in the dialogues.  It is sad that a running joke about this series is that of women sniffing while smoothing their blue slashed with cream skirts.  Strip away the extraneous description and very little happens within the character exchanges outside of the above-mentioned monotonous comedy of manners.

But yet there was a greater sense of focus here.  The Rand and Ebou Dar chapters get a lot of play and while the Ebou Dar one overplayed its comedic elements, any enjoyment I derived from the book came from reading the Rand chapters.  Perhaps it is because I am aware of how this plays out in the following five volumes, but I did find Rand's progression into a hardened, ruthless character to be fairly well-done.  Sure, there were times that he moaned too much in the internal monologues (which still continue to plague me whenever I read this series), but on the whole, the character actually had some believable development done over the course of this novel.

So while it wasn't as disjointed in feel as was Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Swords contained too many dull and redundant moments for me to be enthused about reading it.  Onwards and upwards.  After all, on the heights The Path of Daggers awaits.

April 2010 Reads and Re-reads

Due to a variety of factors (including reading a dozen or so books that really could have been improved if they were half their length), I finished the month of April with my lowest monthly reading total in over a year and a half at only 25 books.  However, I'm still on pace for my goal of reading/re-reading at least 400 books this year.  Below are the books I've read.  Some will have comments, others references to reviews past and forthcoming:

113 Joel Shepherd, Sasha (fair-to-middling at best.  Never really engaged with this story of a spunky princess learning how to be a fighter)

114 Joel Shepherd, Petrodor (the second volume did not improve my opinion of the first)

115 Richard Peabody (ed.), Gravity Dancers (read for BAF; no comments)

116 Samuel Delany, Neveryóna (deep and mostly entertaining.  Glad I read it)

117 Salman Rushdie, Shame (I believe this was his second novel.  On par with the very good Midnight's Children)

118 Dani Shapiro (ed.), Best New American Voices 2010 (read for BAF; no comment)

119 Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden (very good story.  Will want to re-read this before writing a review, though, now that I've read too many epic fantasies in the interim)

120 Jaime Martínez Tolentino, Cuentos fantásticos (Spanish; re-read; decent)

121 Robert Jordan, From the Two Rivers (re-read; first half of The Eye of the World; already reviewed)

122 Robert Jordan, Into the Blight (re-read; second half of The Eye of the World; already reviewed)

123 Frank Herbert, Dune (re-read; already reviewed)

124 Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Spanish; re-read; outstanding story collection)

125 Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (re-read; already reviewed)

126 Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works (play collection; very good)

127 Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos (Spanish; excellent story anthology)

128 Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt (re-read; already reviewed)

129 Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (re-read; already reviewed)

130 Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn (re-read; already reviewed)

131 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (re-read; dull, with only occasional patches of interesting scenes and themes)

132 Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune (re-read; already reviewed)

133 Robert Jordan, The Shadow Rising (re-read; already reviewed)

134 Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune (re-read; already reviewed)

135 Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven (re-read; already reviewed)

136 Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse:  Dune (re-read; already reviewed)

137 Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos (re-read; already reviewed)


Won't be listing the magazines and journals read this month, in part because most of them I only read fragments from here and there, skipping over stories not suitable for consideration for BAF 4.  Not many partial reads either to share, none really that wouldn't be restarted at the beginning, so those won't be listed here at all.

Future Plans:

Continue the re-reading project of alternating SF/epic fantasy series.  Finish the WoT series (currently on The Path of Daggers, with #9-11 and the prequel New Spring to follow), as well as finishing the SOIAF series (currently on A Clash of Kings).  After the SOIAF series is complete, start re-reading/reviewing R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor books, to be alternated with, after the WoT books are finished, with Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen.  The Bakker will be followed by Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and Matthew Stover's The Acts of Caine books.  Might also have time for C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy.

And if this starts to drive me mad, I'll mix in books by Gene Wolfe, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Zoran Živković, and maybe a few others.

Already am on #140 for the year, so who knows?  Maybe I'll aim for 50 books read/commented upon this month...or maybe not?

A deep thought from George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings

There is a profound statement within this passage. Can you guess what it is?

"They want to hunt," agreed Gage the cook as he tossed cubes of suet in a great kettle of stew. "A wolf smells better'n any man. Like as not, they've caught the scent o' prey."

Maester Luwin did not think so. "Wolves often howl at the moon. These are howling at the comet. She how bright it is, Bran? Perchance they think it is the moon."

When Bran repeated that to Osha, she laughed aloud. "Your wolves have more wit than your maester," the wildling woman said. "They know truths the grey man has forgotten." The way she said it made him shiver, and when he asked what the comet meant, she answered, "Blood and fire, boy, and nothing sweet."

Bran asked Septon Chayle about the comet while they were sorting through some scrolls snatched from the library fire. "It is the sword that slays the season," he replied, and soon after the white raven came from Oldtown bringing word of autumn, so doubtless he was right.

Though Old Nan did not think so, and she'd lived longer than any of them. "Dragons," she said, lifting her head and sniffing. She was near blind and could not see the comet, yet she claimed she could smell it. "It be dragons, boy," she insisted. Bran got no princes from Nan, no more than he ever had.

Hodor said only, "Hodor." That was all he ever said. (pp. 71-72)

SOIAF re-read project: George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

My experiences reading George R.R. Martin's fiction may differ in some respects from several reading this.  When I was 12 years old in 1986, I was in my school library during 7th grade study hall and I was browsing through the magazines.  There was one excellent SF magazine (my maternal grandparents subscribed to it, come and think of it) there, the late, great OMNI.  I remember reading over the course of two months a two-part horror story called "The Pear-Shaped Man."  Even today, nearly 24 years later, that story is still one of the creepiest stories that I ever recall reading.

I loved it, of course.  But I never remembered who the author was.  Flash forward to 1998.  Robert Silverberg edited this huge all-star anthology of secondary-world fantasy simply called Legends.  In it was an interesting novella called "The Hedge Knight."  Good story, perhaps something I'll want to explore later, I thought, being but a poor graduate-level teaching trainee at the time.  Still didn't register who wrote the story.

Two years later, during the late winter/early spring of 2000, I was a frequent visitor (but not yet a poster) to the now-defunct WoT fansite, wotmania.  I saw where the webmaster, Mike Mackert, was raving about this series, only two volumes in length then, by some guy named George R.R. Martin.  Being a first-year teacher at the time and wanting something new to read (I think my book collection at the time was barely 200, or 10% of what it is today), I bought a paperback copy of A Game of Thrones soon afterwards, followed by making Amazon purchases of A Clash of Kings in hardcover that summer and pre-ordering A Storm of Swords for its October 31, 2000 release. 

Out of the three, I enjoyed A Game of Thrones the most, as I found the action in A Clash of Kings to lag, not to mention it took me from early November 2000-mid-March 2001 to get around to finishing A Storm of Swords, which at the time I found to be the most bloated and least enjoyable of the three.  I seem to recall making some semi-negative comments sometime in late 2001 on wotmania that drew some visitors from the SOIAF fansite, Westeros.  The resulting (mostly) civil discussion ended up with me deciding to re-read the series early in 2002.  My opinions of each book improved, especially for the third volume, although I still have never had the amount of admiration for Martin's prose and characterization that numerous fans have had.  Despite being at the Nashville booksigning in November 2005 that launched his fourth A Song of Ice and Fire book, A Feast for Crows, I never got around to reading that book.  Don't know exactly why, except that I think I was very busy with my Spanish and Social Work classwork at the time (although I knew then that I would be dropping out of that dual program after the semester due to having lost my job a couple of months before) and afterward, there were several other books awaiting my attention.

So it's been eight years since I last read the first three volumes and the fourth volume will be an initial read for me.  Just as I did in the Dune Chronicles commentaries and what I'm currently doing with the WoT ones, I'll be writing more from the perspective of how I'm reacting to the text, how I remembered reacting to it years before, and if my impressions have improved or not.  There may be some analysis, but these commentaries are not intended to be formal reviews (although I'm well capable of writing those if I so choose).

Now onto A Game of Thrones. When I read it during the spring of 2000 almost exactly ten years ago, it was a refreshing read.  I believe I had read and re-read the WoT series a handful of times the three years prior to that and I was growing tired of that series and the little epic fantasy that I had tried outside of Tolkien did not appeal to me.  I was more of a "classics" and historical fiction reader at the time, when I did not indulge in reading some of the historical monographs that I had kept from my days as a history grad student.  Back then, I believe it was the "political" nature of the book that appealed to me the most - the plotting, the scheming, the murder attempts, and eventually the beginnings of an armed rebellion.  The pacing was decent and the characters were distinctive. 

It was pretty much an entertaining read that did not "shock me."  I've always found it interesting to hear of those readers who are put off by the "character deaths" in this series.  From the opening scenes set in Winterfell, I always found myself thinking of Ned Stark as being a tragic figure, one whose rigid morality was too different from the scheming nobles around him to allow him to survive for long.  But I never really thought too much about the other characters during my initial two reads in 2000 and 2002.

During this read, I decided to pay closer attention to how Martin structures his scenes.  What I noticed is that there is little overlap between characters who are in the same locale.  Each PoV character, told in third-person limited PoV, differs significantly in tone and reactions from the others in the area.  After struggling recently with umpteenth sniffing woman/Aes Sedai in my WoT re-read series, this was a refreshing change of pace.  Although there were some necessary usages of internal monologue, Martin did not indulge himself too much here, as he shapes the dialogues to carry the brunt of the scene load.  The result ends up being subtle characterization shifts/developments that are introduced and later deployed to great effect without the author feeling the need to keep shouting, "Hey!  You!  Pay attention to this clever bit of foreshadowing!"  The fact that there are no plot "prophecies" in this book (and very few in the series, if I recall) is a great relief, since I'm not the sort of reader who needs those sorts of foreshadowings to keep on reading.

The pace was more languid than I recalled, however.  For some reason, I had thought the time between Ned's realization of who Prince Joffrey's real father was and his subsequent arrest and execution was much closer than it actually was.  There were a few times where it seemed to take overly long to develop certain scenes, but these are relatively minor quibbles, considering that for the most part, the character interactions developed earlier in the novel appear to explode into vivid action for the last quarter of the novel.  From the Stark (and Jon Stark) children's ties with the direwolves found in the beginning of the book to the antagonisms between Stark and Lannister that result from Robb Stark humiliating Prince Joffrey, to the ways that caprice and cruelty breed and spread, Martin uses most of what he hints at earlier in the novel to great effect in this one.

There are a few storylines that hint only at some minor progression and nothing approaching a narrative resolution here.  Robb's actions after his father's execution merely set the stage for the next two volumes; same holds true with Jon's experiences with the Black Watch.  With the exception of the Daenerys story arc (which reaches a crucial narrative point), the various subplots of A Game of Thrones end up feeling like the stage has been set more than anything else.  No real narrative cliffhangers, but the tone of the novel's concluding chapters feels as though a thunderstorm is about to burst over the heads of the characters involved.  Much better read this time than I recalled experiencing my first two times reading it.  Might find it hard to keep alternating between series at this rate.