First off, let me be clear when I say this. I am generally not a book sort of person. If I have the option of reading a book or watching a movie based off of the book, more than likely I’m going to save myself some time and just watch the movie. That being said, every once in a while I’ll pick up a book that sounds interesting or that a friend highly recommends to me. Usually I don’t get hooked on a book though, I might read half of it and then it is doomed to remain in my dusty bookshelf for all eternity. Every once in a great while though there is a book that comes along that grabs me and sucks me in. About a year and a half ago after a lot of coaxing by a friend I finally gave George R.R. Martins book, “A Game of Thrones” a shot. Truth be told it by itself is a book that starts off really slow, but don’t let it fool you. It takes about three quarters of the book to get into the actual story with all the character development, but once you reach the real part of the story there is no going back. After almost a month of reading in my spare time I finished the four amazing books in the series, but when I finished I realized there were more books to come and I was excited to read the next one. At the time though I did not realize that it was going to be a long cold two years before the next one would make its debut. Now over that two year period of time between books I again lost my interest in reading. After all I’m a college student now and I have plenty to read other than leisure books, but when I heard that after all this time the fifth book of the series, “A Dance with Dragons” was finally coming out I was radiating with excitement. I found it amazing that after so long I still remembered most of the plot line, and was still excited to read the continuation of the story.
Finally after being excited for this release for a few months it finally was released on July 12th 2011. I bought it that day and had finished reading it less than a week after picking it up. Again, I’m not a very active reader, so for me reading about a thousand pages in five days is a lot. Not only was it a good read all the way threw, but it also left me excited for the sixth book in the series. The greatest part of his new book is that where the fourth book was a bit slow for me because they had set their focus on Westeros where all the boring characters were located. In this new book they did just the opposite, now the fifth book takes place at the same time as the fourth, but instead it is focused on everywhere except Westeros and has all the exciting characters that the fourth books did not deliever like my two favorite: Arya Stark and Jon Snow.
All in all, if you have never read the series, “A Song of Ice and Fire” and you do enjoy a medieval fantasy sort of read you really just can’t beat a great new book like, “A Dance with Dragons.” This reader just hopes that the next book to come out in the series, “The Winds of Winter” doesn’t also take five years to be released!