First, just to say, our house has sold. So all of the careful preparation---and tireless tidying---has paid off. Whew!

Second, I'm in the middle---or almost the middle: Goodreads tells me page 331 is 44% of the way through the book---of reading George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows. I was fiercely fond of the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire, but I put off reading this one because I knew books four and five were two halves of the same story and I wanted to read them within weeks of each other. Because of that, though, it's been eleven years since I last visited Martin's world, and I'm finding the journey rather different than I remember.

Everything is so *slow*. It takes Martin pages and pages to tell something that really only needs half that. And his prose is padded with descriptions of coats of arms and legions of relatives, most of whom I can't even hope to remember from one page to the next. And while I like some characters better than others, I'm finding it difficult to care about any of them. That may be because my favorite characters---Jon and Tyrion and Dany---aren't in this book at all, but I suspect part of it is that while Martin excels at illuminating characters' weaknesses, he's not nearly as gifted at showing us their vulnerabilities. Weaknesses encourage tolerance and even affection, but it's vulnerabilities, I think, that stir love in a reader.

What I'm wondering now is whether this is simply the weakest book in the series or whether my tastes and expectations for the fantasy literature I read have changed. I'm certainly a more mature fantasy *writer* than I was eleven years ago, and much of my philosophies as a writer have been shaped by the fantasy I've read. When crafting my own stories and characters, my first thoughts are of Robin Hobb and Sherwood Smith and Robin McKinley. I still love Martin's intrigues, but I see room for improvement---or at least, what I would consider improvement---where I didn't before.