Me either. I got through the first four books and threw in the towel. Cookie cutter characters with little to no character development and page after page of pretty much nothing happening.
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The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.
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:-)


:-)
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The Wheel of Time series still has one left to go. Some stuff I'd recommend for after you're finished with GRR Martin's (new one out in July so you're timing it right):

Glen Cook's Black Company (10 novels, hasn't been a new one in over a decade, but I think another is due sometime soon)
Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy + Best Served Cold & The Heroes
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt (Currently at 5 novels, I've read 4 and they're fantastic - 6th coming out this year)

There are a metric ton of other series out there that I need to start reading. I've just begun listening to Ken Scholes' Psalms of Isaak.

Other people have mentioned them at times in the thread, but for lighter reading I'd recommend both Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series (he lives in Independence IIRC - his Codex Alera series is also good) and Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries. Both are urban fantasy (Codex Alera is epic fantasy, actually begun, as I recall, when somebody dared Butcher to base a fantasy series on Pokemon :-) ).
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Too many other things to read to spend wasting time wading through that morass.
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I actually really enjoyed the series, but he goes into an incredible amount of detail that makes the plot seem to bog down pretty badly in places. I had a lot of trouble keeping interested between books 6-8 or so, but I still found it interesting. It helps to have a dedicated period of time every workday when my choices are to read or to try and play on ChiefsPlanet on my phone.

As much as I loved the series until Robert Jordan's passing, however, Brandon Sanderson was a nice breath of fresh air for the last two. Suddenly things moved more quickly and were more exciting. I'm excited to read the last one next year.
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To clarify, are you talking about the WoT or Fire and Ice?
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Braum Stoker's Dracula...not a single movie adaptation I've seen comes close to the novel. Not necessarily a bad thing, I was just really surprised how much of the book was spent chasing Dracula back to his homeland. Was probably quite mind blowing when it was first published.
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BTW, help me out here. I'm not getting the joke.
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I love that series, but there are times where I'll find myself zoning out for pages, or wondering when the 50-page prologue is going to end when the actual novel is going to begin. There are fans of epic fantasy who love having every minute detail depicted for them in painstaking detail, but I don't always count myself among them.
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I thought reading the WOT books was a case of literary blue balls. All this extended build up and then - nothing.
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Things started coming to a head in Crossroads of Twilight (Book 10). Knife of Dreams (Jordan's last book) went a bit further in that direction. Gathering Storm and particularly,Towers of Midnight wrapped up almost everything outside of the Last Battle. A Memory of Light is basically going to be dedicated entirely to Tarmon Gai'don.
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If I'm ever confined to long term hospital care or a long jail term, maybe I'll pick up the series again.
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You're welcome to your opinion, just don't expect me to ever agree completely with it. The series does have its issues, as I've mentioned, but at the same time I do like it enough that I've read it 5 times. Which is I think more than I've read anything outside of the Dune series.
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I'm just messing around.

It's kind of odd that it didn't catch on with me, actually. I'm usually a sucker for the "common person finds out that he/she is actually a powerful magician or heir to a king and gets caught up in momentous events" type of fantasy.
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