...because I would have an, at least, five-year break to look forward to for the next book!

You know, it's really really hard to review anything that you legitimately love.  And this book, to me, is bad ass - a quite muscular plot, characters that you can really feel strongly for and, as I have mentioned before, the world is an amazingly well-defined fantasy world filled with a great deal of realistic conflict in which no one side of any issue is ever painted as the ends-all side which is in the complete right.

Aside from some rather miniscule problems (the plot slows down, to me, when we get to the Iron Isle, waiting for something I care about to FINALLY happen - a problem I had with the Wall in the last two books in certain places) and I do spend some of the book wondering what is going on with some of the characters who don't appear in the book (a problem remedied by the fact that A Dance with Dragons is really a book of other viewpoints of storylines that couldn't make it into this book), this is a book that's not completely perfect, but it's damn hard to find a fault in such a drama as thoroughly engrossing as this series continues to be.

I mean... there is a certain character who unexpectedly returns to the story in a shocking manner, and I was left scratching my head at the sudden return, but that seems like a late-addition problem that arrives just late enough in the book that it doesn't spoil the whole thing.

Yeah, not that interesting, I know.  How about we talk about a couple of things related to books?

A. I need to discover some way to be able to read books in the bath tub - comfortably - and not ever run the risk of water damage to said books.

B. I really need to stop buying books.  As in, period - I finally broke and asked to get A Dance with Dragons and, a bit randomly, The Professor and the Madman.  I really don't want to see the list of how many books I actually own.

C. Jeez, that price difference between list price, brand new books.  Even at 50% off, books can be such costly extravagances that it's hard to justify the hobby if you live in an area/circumstance where you need to buy them at a full, new price. ESPECIALLY those hard covers, wow!  I don't know what I would do if I did not have thrift stores at a fifteen minute drive away.

Is it after midnight?  Oooh, I should probably quit while I'm ahead.   I think that I should take a break between this book and the next.

I've read some bad, achingly dull fantasy in the past, that is bereft of any charm or characterization, but as I continue this series, I find that I am rewarded for my tenacity with this genre.  The entire series is like a parabola, expanding outwards, gaining speed and a real feeling of authenticity while feeling majestic and astounding enough, in its land and the characters who populate it, so that it is truly worthy of the label of not being Fantasy, exactly, but something better - anti-Fantasy.  

Sure, it drags a bit in places where I would rather I find out what's happening with my favorite characters (and, I am not kidding here, about 80% of the characters could arguably be said to be my "favorites", in the right context - an astounding feat, in a series whose characters fill up a list in the back of each book that is 70+ pages in length!) but things are uncomplicated, in terms of whose POV I am in, which each chapter generally stating whose POV the chapter will be in (THANK YOU MARTIN FOR THIS CONSIDERATION!) and you are never certain whose story will come next. 

Reading this series feels like an active experience, exciting, touching, shocking and unbelievable all at the same time.