A Song of Tits and Wine (Spoilers!)

[DeekyFun]

I’m just about to start it again…

[BillButNotBen]

I’m just about to start it again…

GoT or WoT or BoT (or Splot?)

I wouldn’t recommend starting WoT again, unless you have a lot of patience and free time on your hands.

I do kinda want to finish the last 2 to finish the story. But I only half remember what happened in the first 10 or so (something about tugging braids?), and I’m sure not going to start them all again.
If they happen to go on sale cheap I might pick them up and then read plot summaries of the preceding ones on wikipedia to refresh my memory.

[LexW]

If anyone is seriously considering re-reading the WoT books, let me just point out how long they are on audiobook - 17 days, 11 hours, and 30 minutes. And that’s a lower figure than I’ve seen before, which was over 19 days. The first book alone is 29 hours - I listened to it recently and it felt like I was listening to FOR WEEKS. Which I probably was. It wasn’t terrible but that’s a lot of time.

A day here is 24 hours. So assuming you read at the same speed as the audiobooks, and read say, 2 hours/day, literally every single day, you will be done in 209 days. So what that’s the 26th May 2020. So that’d basically be a big part of your life for over six months.

So I mean, just chew on that before considering approaching WoT again!

[DeekyFun]

Yup, the Wheel of Time. All er… what did Lex say, 17 er… days. Oh boy. Anyway, everything feels longer when you start attributing facts and figures to it.

So hear me out. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned my eternal battle with WoT here before, I kind of feel like it’s my white whale at this point. I’ve read up to book 9 (I think), but honestly, past book 6 everything is just kind of one messy blur. I definitely started skimming. I’ve tried jumping back on at various junctures but the gap of time since I last really ‘read’ is big enough that there are gaps in my memory, so I am considering starting again. I plan on watching the TV show, so I figures I could maybe just try to keep pace with that, reading the first few now, and then doing the rest in between series, giving me room to read other things as well so it’s not just a WoT marathon (I’m assuming here that the show will even work that way series to series, or that it isn’t cancelled immediately).

I am aware that it’s a crazy time investment, and also that, given my issues when I got to the back half of the series, that it might be a futile effort, but I did enjoy the first batch of books, and I’m not convinced I couldn’t like the later lot, and I would like to read the end and see how it all ties together. I hear a lot of stuff about the WoT as a complete body of work that makes me feel like I should finish it. It might be a pathological need though. We’ll see.

[BillButNotBen]

I got to 9 or maybe 10 as well… I don’t actually remember and it’s hard to work out because books about 6-10 nothing happens so the plot summaries are almost identical.

I have also entertained the idea of going back and finishing the last few books (especially with the hope that Sanderson moves things along a bit faster), but as time has passed I’ve forgotten more and more of what happened.
But I can’t see myself ever going back and reading them all.

I’d go for reading plot summaries if I were you. It is no exaggeration to say that most of what happens in books 6+ can be summarised in a few pages, especially because anything of note did tend to happen only in the last 5 pages of each book.
Plus, if I started them again from scratch I think I’d have forgotten the beginning by the time I got to book 10.
Plus I sold them all to oxfam years ago.

I think The Witcher 1 is my white whale…

[Det.Bullock]

I re-read them when I bought the british paperbacks, it’s quite ironic that you people seem to have stopped shortly before volume 11 which is when the pacing starts to pick up again.

[DominusNox]

First post is from 2nd of April 2014. where GRRM reads a excerpt from Winds of Winter.
Now it’s 21st of August 2020. and we still waiting on that book.
I gave up hope of him ever finishing in 2018.

[LexW]

Even if he did finish it, it’s not even the last book. There’s another one after it.

[Skalpadda]

I find it pretty unlikely he’d be able to wrap it up in two more books even, unless the last one is 900 pages of “rocks fall, everyone dies”. There are so many threads going into Winds of Winter.

[LexW]

I find it pretty unlikely he’d be able to wrap it up in two more books even, unless the last one is 900 pages of “rocks fall, everyone dies”. There are so many threads going into Winds of Winter.

I’m pretty sure Winds of Winter is 1500+ pages of “Others chop people up, everyone dies!” and “Dragons breathe fire, everyone dies”, based on what he’s said about that and A Dream of Spring.

I don’t know that we’ll ever see them in full, but I daresay we’ll eventually find out, and I strongly suspect that if King’s Landing burns (and I imagine it will), it’ll burn in Winds of Winter. A Dream of Spring, I suspect, is going to be more the aftermath to that in totally unnecessary detail, potentially setting up countless sequels which will either never happen, or not be written by GRRM. I mean, it’s possible Winds of Winter ends with the battle at Winterfell, and then A Dream of Spring climaxes at the burning of King’s Landing, but I’m just really skeptical that even massively expanded, there could be all that much material between those two events. I mean, season 8 was 6 episodes, which were:

1. Everyone arrives at Winterfell
2. Preparation for battle
3. Battle
4. Aftermath and everyone arrives at King’s Landing
5. Battle
6. Aftermath

And of these novels, he’s said that between them, they’ll likely be over 3000 manuscript pages.

I’m pretty sure, too, that at this point, based on the sheer amount he’s written, that he’s actually finished Winds of Winter, and is just extensively tinkering with it.

It’s also possible that the ending will be almost entirely different, perhaps to the point of different characters dying/surviving/becoming king. D&D themselves said S8 was “mostly original material”, and only loosely based on stuff that GRRM had told them, at one point.

[DominusNox]

Yea GRRM conceived Song of Ice and Fire to be told over 7 books as there are 7 kingdoms and 7 gods.
Also he said in an interview (ages ago) that he knows the ending. He told his writing in like a road trip. He knows the destination but the roads he’ll take and what will happen along the way is unknown.
Seems he took a wrong turn and got lost.

[LexW]

Yea GRRM conceived Song of Ice and Fire to be told over 7 books as there are 7 kingdoms and 7 gods.

Uh, that is sadly not true. I’m not sure where you got that from, but it wasn’t GRRM. He originally conceived ASoIaF as a trilogy with a massive time-skip from book 1 to book 2, and thus that book 2 would have been equivalent to book 4/5 in the actual series. He’s talked about this many times.

A Song of Ice and Fire

Look it even says it in the bit it immediately quotes from Wikipedia. This is all sourced. I’ve been following the series since about 2001/2002 (my brother read A Game of Thrones in 1997, but thought it was lurid and OTT so I didn’t read it until later). Martin by 2002 thought it would be 5 books. That grew to six, and then seven.

All the problems he’s had go back to him dropping that time-skip. Now, complicating matters is that books 2/3 are really, really good, so I can see why he didn’t do the time-skip after just one book, but he (again according to GRRM himself) had another opportunity to do a time-skip when he got to book 3 . And he foolishly didn’t take it, which made books 4/5/6 massively harder to write, because he’d created a huge number of plot strands, many of which needed resolving actually in the books (not just in the background as they would be with a time-skip), and which worked against each other - he characterised it like the Gordian Knot, except he couldn’t find a way to slice it like Alexander, so had to unpick it.

[Skalpadda]

I don’t know that we’ll ever see them in full, but I daresay we’ll eventually find out, and I strongly suspect that if King’s Landing burns (and I imagine it will), it’ll burn in Winds of Winter. A Dream of Spring, I suspect, is going to be more the aftermath to that in totally unnecessary detail, potentially setting up countless sequels which will either never happen, or not be written by GRRM. I mean, it’s possible Winds of Winter ends with the battle at Winterfell, and then A Dream of Spring climaxes at the burning of King’s Landing, but I’m just really skeptical that even massively expanded, there could be all that much material between those two events.

I doubt we’ll see anything like a burning of King’s Landing in Winds of Winter. It starts with Stannis on his way to lay siege on Winterfell. In show terms we’re mostly back in season 5 and even if we assume the main plot will roughly go where the show did there are a bunch of threads introduced in the last two released books that the show completely skipped, and characters in completely different places and circumstances.

[LexW]

You may be right. But I think if it doesn’t happen in Winds of Winter, then the plot of A Dream of Spring is going to be drastically divergent to the TV show, to the point where even if King’s Landing burns and Dany gets shanked, it’ll be a very different scenario, and indeed it’s possible neither will occur.

[Skalpadda]

I expect even if some characters and events might end up in similar places the paths there will be very different. Stuff like…

• The Young Griff plot and Varys being an Aegon supporter.
• Sansa and Arya will definitely take different paths than in the show
• The Wildling and Mance plots aren’t resolved in the books.
• I’d be very surprised if we don’t spend some time finding out what Osha and Rickon have been up to (possibly through Davos’ PoV, but Skagos just seems too alluring for GRRM not to write about).
• Everything about Dorne.
• The Iron Isles plot seems very different with more prominent secondary characters like Victarion.
• The Tyrell and Sparrows plot is still unfurling and I can’t imagine it ending as neatly and abruptly in the books. Like the Sparrows is a gigantic movement and the Tyrells aren’t (all) idiots.
• Brienne, Jayme, Lady Stoneheart and the remnants of the Brotherhood.
• The Blackfish is still alive.

… and probably a dozen other things that don’t come to mind just now.

[LexW]

The Tyrell and Sparrows plot is still unfurling and I can’t imagine it ending as neatly and abruptly in the books. Like the Sparrows is a gigantic movement and the Tyrells aren’t (all) idiots.

Yeah that’s one I’ll be particularly interested to see in the books if they ever come out, because I suspect it will be very different.

[DominusNox]

Tbh don’t know/remember where I heard that but thanks for clearing it up @LexW.