I'm in the same position with that series as I am with the Robin Hobb ship one - I read the first book right when it came out, and like them, but now it's been so long that I can't pick up the others without rereading the first, and for some reason I'm resistant to doing that.

I'm currently reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and loving it. He does a wonderful job of building a different universe with its own rules and physics and expectations, and doing it solidly enough that it's very real and compelling.

Regarding A Feast for Crows, George's website says:

"I said that I hoped to have the book done by the end of the year. Famous last words. No, it's not done, though I am getting closer. I have more than thirteen hundred pages in final draft form and another hundred or so in roughs or fragments, but there are still some chapters yet to write. I'm telling myself that I'm on the home stretch. As soon as FEAST as done, I will announce it here." —George R.R. Martin, January 17, 2005

t twitches

Thirteen. hundred. pages...damn.

But Random House says July 2005 is that just a guestimate or wishful thinking on their part?

Dunno, seems kind of ambitious if he still had chapters to write in mid-January. I don't think it would be the first time that the dates had slipped on books in this series, he said, a master of understatement.

But July would be nice.

Sir Bedivere

Yes! Thank you, Ginger's spicy brains!

I'm waiting for the library to pry the last Robin Hobb book out of the wretched fingers of whoever keeps forgetting to return them. I was so desperate I checked the local Barnes & Noble, but they didn't have it. A shelf and a half of Laurell K. Hamilton, but not one copy of "Fool's Fate"! Ahhh!

I wonder if he'll wind up with 5 books rather than 4?

1300 pages is almost twice as long as the others, no?

I've nevre read anything of Martin's, but I did carry around one of his books all day once, getting an autograph for my flatmate. I think it was Volume 1 of some series, and even that was big enough to bludgeon somebody with.

There is a limit beyond which a book cannot be bound, after which you'd have to go to a bigger trim size, thinner paper, or two volumes, but I don't know that it's happened in hardcover recently. Usually, the editor comes in with the mighty cluestick and says, "Keep this draft for the Ultimate Edition in ten years. Now, cut 500 pages for a realistic edition."

I was thinking that too, that his editor may have chopped the book in half. The series wasn't supposed to be this long in the first place, I don't think. I remember some discussion a while back about George discovering that writing a big historical fantasy trilogy was ::hard:: and the only way out was more books.

I believe that Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series was originally supposed to be a trilogy and we are now waiting for the sixth book in the series. (Out in the UK this summer.) And there is going to be a book seven (as I just discovered on her website!)