Martin is not for you if you have a weak stomach. He is not the American Tolkien. No one is the [insert nationality here] Tolkien. He is not a linguist. He was screenwriter and sci-fi author before he took up High Fantasy. However, I argue that he is quite good. He is realistic (in a fantasy sense) and there are true "good" and "evil" characters, but there are A LOT of gray characters. The character development is excellent (every main character has or get their own POV chapters) and magic is kept in the background, especially until the two most recent books. If you don't like nasty people and descriptions of the nasty things they do or the realistic battle scenes that really capture the horrors of medieval war, then I could see how you would have a hard time reading thousands of pages of it!
A question this raises for me - is it possible for modern fantasy authors to write a good trilogy or even a decent number of books? I am thinking of Martin, Goodkind, and Jordan and their insanely lengthy works. The closest I can think is Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and the third book of that had to be cut in two for the paperback!
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