They weren't especially, though at a typical level for his lighter-toned work, which this falls into. (Which is why Feet of Clay and Night Watch remain my favorites in Discworld proper.)

Feet of Clay was my least favorite of the Watch books, huh! And I was hoping to love Night Watch more than I actually did, I think.

I got one more thing to say about this book and then I'll shut up.

...for nearly eleven months Julia had resided in my brain, in those drafty, capacious, hopeful apartments where the ghost of Santa Claus still placidly rattled about, along with my watchfully dead grandmother, and reincarnation and magic and everything else that couldn't survive out in the brighter hard highways of my mean metropolitan mind.

that's beautiful.

Seriously, NYT? [link]

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Stay classy, Grey Lady.

Oh hell. I DID belong to a book club where that exact thing happened. What a fucking idiot.

While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first.

Dude, depends on the book club. They're gonna get a shedload of letters about that. Also, apparently they missed the memo about how men read SF and women read fantasy (even though it's not entirely true).

What I find frustrating about the whole ASoF&I thing is how much more attention Martin gets than female writers who are doing the exact same thing. Kate Elliott's got a number of meaty complex plotty fantasies with good world-building, but she doesn't get nearly as much slavering fannish adoration--even though she does, in fact, finish her series.

I have to admit I have a lurking suspicion as to why that is...

IO9 rebuts the NYT, saying Game of Thrones is obviously for girls.

That article totally fooled me at first. I had to read this over and over:

well I will grant you that scenes of explicit sex, especially the rape and brother-sister incest we see in Game, have traditionally appealed only to female audiences

I'm still baffled by that, ita.

I have not read The Game of Thrones et al, because my tolerance for really long books with a lot of names in them has gone down as I've gotten older. I would, however, be more likely to read it than most literary fiction. In general, I'm allergic to almost anything described as "chick," unless the subject is baby chickens.

ita's white font reminded me: Did you know that there are big omnibus editions of V.C. Andrews' series? And that they're shelved prominently in the YA/Teen Reading section? Sure, most of us read them as teens, but actually *marketing* them to the YA readers? Ooooh-kaay.