re: #233 JasonA

By book three, Storm of Swords, this series totally eclipses anything Tolkien wrote for me.

Well they are two totally different things. The star of Tolkien’s writig is Middle Earth itself. However his plots and characters are more than a little one dimensional - which was by design. He was after all going for a myth made from scratch.

The Song of Ice and Fire is about characters who are deeply memorable and the plot is as complex and page turning and unpredictable (yet satisfyingly so) as anything I have ever read. The twits in it are my favorite kind - you never saw them coming, but once revealed make perfect sense, were actually subtly hinted at and move the story forward in a cool way, rather than just being a “twist” for the sake of a twist.

With Tolkien, every little detail of the world he built mattered and had a back story. With Martin every little character matters and has a profound effect on something.