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About A Song of Ice and Fire

ASOIAF is a low-fantasy & historical fiction hybrid created by GRRM. What marks this book from other fantasy books is that you get a first-person PoV to each character and objective details are made personal and more subjective so as to increase immersion. The majority of the characters are either too pale or not that outstanding so as to make the story seems real, but "reality is stranger than fiction", and in reality, you would get a spectrum of characters more interesting than that presented by ASOIAF. GRRM also has a bad habit of getting too bogged down into little details, so as to drag down the pacing of the plot.

GOT: 7/10. This serves as the introduction to ASOIAF, so the novel most majorly focuses on world-building, character development, nothing interesting really happens in this book until the ending of the book, where an important person dies, and you get dragons. Standard fantasy book.

ACOK: 5/10. The sequel of GOT. The story-line lot starts to get interesting, with things becoming interesting at the wall and with Daenerys with shit tons of foreshadowing at the House of the Undying, centering on the conflict of the Five Kings, which culminated in the battle of Blackwater Bay. Too bad the majority of the books is uninteresting, and nothing really interesting happens. The Bran and Sansa chapters are the worst.

ASOS: 10/10. This book is full of surprises. Not only is this the longest book, it's also the one with the most emotional impact. The pacing gets faster, and much more intriguing than the previous two books. Most readers agrees that this is the best book in the seires because this book is when shit gets real. Red wedding, Purple wedding, Tyrion's trial by combat...etc. This is an acme of high fantasy.

AFFC: 1/10. Worst book of the whole series. I made a mistake by reading this book after reading ASOS. Pacing is slowed down to a turtle's pace, and the prose and language becomes stale like rotten bread. The least thing I need are page long monologues of Cersei. I threw this book out because it takes up too much space in my bookshelf.

ADWD: 6/10. I was very looking forward to some new story advancements when this came out, so i was very disappointed with the slow pacing of this book. I got chills watching all the Northmen allying with the Starks, and Theon's transformation. However, there's still too much description of details, and something worse: shoddy character development: Tyrion becomes a former shadow of itself, instead of the cynical, mistreated, ruthless man I like him as. There's also no real resolution or emotional payoff to any of the sub-plots. Daenery and Tyrion trying to maintain power together was one of the worst sub-plots in ASOIAF.