Hello Everyone!

[Bill, Moderator]

Welcome Ryan!

I recently finished reading Martin's series, after giving up a prior read at about book 7. It's an interesting journey, not without problems.

[Bill, Moderator]

One problem begins about book 6 or 7 up to book 9 or 10. There was not much advancement of the story. I had the feeling Martin was just writing to add more books to make more money.

Reading the books back to back, it seemed there was too much repetition. He kept telling us the same things over and over, from descriptions to characteristics of the characters. I ended up skipping a lot of these as the books went on.

I think each of the books could have been at least a third shorter without losing anything.

I was disappointed in the last book. While it resolved everything, it... I can't say here without big time spoilers.

Still all in all I'm glad I re-read the 1st 6 or 7 books and continued the series. It is truly epic fantasy, but I liked Tolkien better.

For a, imo, much better massive epic fantasy, I'd suggest The Wars of Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts. It is very complex and requires a a good bit of work from the reader.

For a massive series with several happen-to-be-Gay characters there is the Valdemar: The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey. Valdemar is actually a bunch of series in the same world.