A Clash of Kings

Pages: 969 📖

Year Published: 1999 🗓️

Days to Complete: 36 🕰️

Author:

George R. R. Martin comes from humble beginnings in New Jersey. He was known to tell and write stories as a child, some much too scary for his peers, and was an avid reader at an early age. Before fully committing to writing, he was an English and journalism teacher at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa. While A Song of Ice and Fire is known as his most successful series, Martin was hard at work writing other stories and books, mostly horror, long before he even considered writing these lengthy epic fantasies. Many of these projects were destined to become movies or shows at some point which lead Martin to move to Hollywood to become more involved in the film industry. After several failures, he turned his attention back to writing full time and thus, A Song of Ice and Fire was born. Currently, George R. R. Martin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and there is a good chance you can catch him attending science fiction conventions.

Learn More about George R. R. Martin

This Book at a Glance:

Stabilizing- This book instills the reader within the world of the series. You start to feel more comfortable with the characters and the politics, but there are still plenty of surprises, even for someone who has seen the show.

Favorite Quote:

"We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes."

There is a lot that is different in Martin's fantasy world, but this rule remains the same between our two realities. I found a lot of quotes that I liked in this book, but this struck me as the most beautifully written, especially in the context of an old man explaining the world to a young boy.

Takeaways:

This book felt like the beginning of the divergence from the TV show. While there were still a lot of similarities, I could tell that the more minute details were starting to differ, which I enjoyed. The trouble was figuring out what was going to be the same and what was going to be different and I was wrong on several occasions.

This sequel further entrenches you in Martin's writing style. There is something about the way that he describes characters and settings that makes 100 pages fly by with little notice.