A Storm of Swords (2000) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3) by George R.R. Martin

I've heard so many stories described as 'rollercoaster rides'. The term gets thrown around all the time. And very few are actually worthy of that descriptor. Most books have some great scenes and action sequences, but very few writers really destroy their characters in ways that allow the possibility of a genuine 'rollercoaster ride' arc.

Martin does, though. He's now famous (infamous?) for it since this series has been adapted to television and thus garnered a wider audience. And it's a reputation that's well earned. I've never read anybody who treats their characters as cruelly as Martin does. You'd think the man was a sadistic bastard who enjoys torturing his masochistic readers if you listened solely to media memes and nothing else. But he's not, and reading Martin is not an exclusively miserable experience. He just has a deep understanding of what makes a good character arc that rends your soul into a million pieces and melts it down afterwards into something altogether newer and grander.

Martin is, more than anything, a superb character writer. And I mean that within the context of all literature, not just genre fiction. Now, I haven't read everything under the sun. I've read comparatively little to many of you. But Martin is one of the best character writers I've ever read. He has his weaknesses (awful love scenes, cheesy dialogue), but he writes characters better than almost anybody. He understands that for a character arc to really punch your heart into paralysis you've got to completely destroy them and let them glue themselves back together while we watch like a parent witnessing their child tumble down the slide headfirst on the playground. You desperately want them to succeed; to climb back up to the top of the slide and do it right this time. But unlike the parent, we're hopelessly separated from these characters by universal barriers and we can't do a damn thing but sit back and bite our nails, watching and hoping. No book in the series does this better than A Storm of Swords. The only other arc that comes to close to the several arcs we have going in this book is Theon's arc in A Dance With Dragons.

A Storm of Swords is really long, but it's also packed in pretty good with action. The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, is nearly the same length as this book, and despite what people praise to the heavens about Count, there are parts of it that really, really drag. I can't think of anything as slowly paced and uneventful in Storm as when the Count first makes it to Paris and spends 500 fucking pages going to the opera and buying a Summer home in Auteuil.

A Storm of Swords is the culmination of what Martin has been building with the first two books. Primarily it utilizes all of the pieces he set up in the comparably drab A Clash of Kings. Storm drops some of its characters down the deepest depths possible, only to raise them up again for a triumphant conclusion. And that's something that people who only scratch the surface of Martin don't seem to understand. Yes, he's cruel to his characters. But none of it is needless, wanton cruelty; it's all done in order to properly frame what's to come. In many ways, A Storm of Swords is the conclusion of the 'first trilogy' of A Song of Ice and Fire, if you will. Many of the arcs we've been following over the previous ~2,000 pages come to a head here, and many are concluded in cathartic fashion. (Martin is currently heading towards what should be the conclusion of the 'second trilogy' within this series with The Winds of Winter, but that's a discussion for another day.)

This book contains both my favorite moment of any book I've ever read, and my least favorite moment of any book I've ever read. It contains my top two or three favorite characters I've ever read, and my top two or three most hated characters I've ever read. At times it diverts from the main narrative to extremely compelling side stories that easily could have filled their own ~300-page novel (Beric Dondarrion and the Brotherhood Without Banners sticks out in my mind). It's these vastly different peaks and valleys that make this book worthy of the 'rollercoaster' moniker that so many other books aspire to.

And that's why people almost universally love this book:

I don't particularly like fantasy (I've read quite a bit of it), yet this is one of my top-5 favorite books, accompanying titles like Notes from the Underground, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Dead. I've already read it twice. I'll probably read it again. And there are no other 1,000+ page epics that I can say that about.

Definitely not The Count of Monte Cristo, at least.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐