I've only heard bad things about the audio books.

Trust me, read the novels fully. You won't be able to put them down. They are all fantastically written. Up to Storm of Swords, they are full of action, and they become a little bit slower for Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons, but they're still very good.

My cousin told, that the third book was the best one. But Feast for Crowes and Dance with the Dragons where boring. I havent read them I just looked up some information in the Internet.

I agree with the third being the best, but Feast and Dance are far from boring.

You'll never know unless you try them. I would recommend you start from the very beginning, because you get a great deal more detail in the books, but you could probably start from Storm of Swords. You would, however, be missing two of the greatest fantasy novels ever written.

Good books, not great. Martin has built one of the finest worlds I've ever read but he's bogging it down with hydra characters (kill one, two more pop up in his/her place), kudzu plot lines, lack of progress, and 4,500 pages into the series, he still hasn't really introduced the wights/others, who were the center of the friggin' prologue in book one.

This series has all the makings of a big ol' mess in the sixth and seventh novels. If he continues down this path and then magically wraps up everything in the last 100 pages of the seventh book, I'm gonna be bent.

I fear that he has bitten off more than any writer could chew with this series. Stuff like having Arya wander around unnecessarily for, oh, about 2,000 pages show that he's just trying to juggle too many characters. He needed her character to not advance while other stuff happened.

And don't even get me started on character growth. Outside of Jaime Lannister, almost every character is the same in book five that they were in book one. Some have changed sides, some have done good, some have done bad, but they're all essentially the same people doing the same stupid things, only now some of them are dead because of it.

I'd agree with you if you were only talking about books 4 & 5. They were slow, characters didn't develop as much as they should and the fact that they both occured at the sametime meant not a lot of eventful material actually got covered. It feels like it's building to something big though.

Books 1-3 on the other hand were fantastic.

I'll second this. I am growing concerned about the future, though. Neither Feast nor Dance felt like they advanced anywhere near as much as 2000 pages should. Hopefully this is just a lull...but a lull that's taken over a decade to get through does not fill me with confidence.

I'm the first to say the books are good, some of them very good (books 1 & 3). I just think they're overrated by many. When you get right down to it, a lot of the story is not enjoyable to read. Too much of the series involves characters you don't like doing things you think are stupid and repeating that formula over and over and over again. And it all takes too long to unfold. And characters rarely grow and mature, they simply die and are replaced by someone equally as stupid.

It's an incredibly frustrating series to read. Some of it is just so bloody good while so much of it is just so bloody annoying. Overall, I've enjoyed it but after books four and five (not very good at all), Martin better get his shit in order for six or the series is going to be a huge letdown. If book six is like four and five, that will mean the middle 40% of the series is mediocre at its best, bad at its worst. No series can be considered "great" if the entire middle portion of the series is boring and uninspired.

HOLYSHITSEASONFINALETONIGHT!!!!

I hope theon greyjoy dies and the hound escapes to the north

Lol I've decided to download it, should be done in about 30 mins meaning I'll watch it about 5 hours from now which should leave me four minutes to grab a cold drink before the Microsoft Conference starts.

<3 Finally a Monday that's good.

Just watched it, awesome episode! Felt like a very natural and satisfactory end to the season.