Synopsis: A Song of Ice & Fire / Book 2

I finished my reread of A Clash of Kings today. 

I was pretty shocked by how poorly it compared to A Game of Thrones. It's still a great book, mind you, thanks mainly to the depth of its characters and the scope of its plot ... but the writing isn't nearly as good. A Game of Thrones was extremely tight writing, mostly in neat little 10 page chapters. Every chapter clearly had a point, and there's wasn't a wasted page.

Conversely, A Clash of Kings meanders a lot. Chapters flop all over, extending to 20 or even 30 pages with some regularity. Often it feels like not a lot goes on in the chapters and you don't have the same sense of something changing every 10 pages as you did in A Game of Thrones. In short, it read like a book that wasn't rewritten and polished ten ways to Tuesday, as I expect A Game of Thrones was.

After the first 200 pages or so, though, in which very little happens, it still kept me enthralled.

So with that said, I'm going to write-up my cheat sheet for this book, so that I can go back and look over it when book 6 is released, some 5-10 years from now. There will be spoilers, of course, so stop now if you haven't read book 2 or seen season 2.

( spoilers )