It was right about at the beginning of George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, the second book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, that I admitted to myself that I wanted to quit my job and everything else in my life so I could stay home and read all day. I resisted the urge. I’m still not quite sure if I made the right decision.

You think you know someone, and then you read the second book about her. (Or him. Though, for the most part, the changes of the hers were more exciting for me in this book. Minus the most clever and entertaining character to waddle through the pages of a fantasy book, who will go unnamed so I don’t spoil the fact that he lived through the first book. Okay, I may have given it away a little.) It’s not that the characters went through any unrealistic shifts; it’s just that Martin let us get to know them even better and we got to watch how they responded to new situations. Or at least I did. You may not have even read A Clash of Kings yet. Your loss.

I think enjoyed the first book more because the slow corruption of an innocent and stable world interested me. But everything else that utterly enthralled me from the first book—the complex and endearing characters, the mystery and intrigue, the moments when honor, family, love, and pride all seem at odds with one another—was there in the second, and was amplified because, with each chapter, I grew more and more invested.

Don’t start this series unless you’re ready to devote yourself to reading every published book of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’ve finished the fourth book and have to sit around waiting for Martin to write and publish the rest. That will be a sad, sad day.

Quotes!

“Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them.”

“He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.”

“A good lord comforts and protects the weak and helpless.”

“When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.”

“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.”

"People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up."

"There's no shame in fear... what matters is how we face it."

"A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the storm."

"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."

"The best lies contain within them nuggets of truth, enough to give a listener pause."

"Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea... Everything changes."

"The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome."