Tolkien and George R. Martin

[Mnemosyne]

I was supposed to read a Martin book for a class, but we ran out of time and never got around to it.

I'm rather glad I didn't as some of my friends did go through it and told me there were some explicit and mostly gratuitous scenes of venery. Which means I can't read it for personal reasons, but if they were right about the "gratuitous" then I cannot say that Martin could possibly be a better writer than Tolkien, who understood the laws of restraint and implication and did not include a single scene unless it was absolutely necessary*.

*Except possibly for some of that Bombadilian poetry...