I finally finished A Dance With Dragons! Whew, I can’t believe it took me that long…AND that it has taken me so long for a new post.

I could say sorry to my followers (though I’m not really sure how many of you actually pay attention to my posts and reviews *if you do I truly appreciate it!*), but really I need to apologize to myself. I love to read and the past few months I let the stress of school and work get in the way of it.

The fact that A Dance With Dragons was the book that I was “Currently Reading” when I started this blog is embarrassing. I flew through the other books, but to be fair, I was on a break and had absolutely nothing to do. I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but this last semester of college was really stressful. Even though I slacked off in areas of my life that I enjoyed, I’m proud that I graduated with a 3.65 GPA in my final semester as a college undergraduate.

And even though I wasn’t able to get through this book as quickly as I thought I would, I’m also proud to say that I didn’t stop reading it altogether. Many nights when I was so stressed to the point of wanting to cry, I made myself turn off the computer and read at least one chapter of ADWD. It was an escape for me and allowed me to have 30 minutes where I was completely immersed in something other than school.

ANYWAY…I’m going to start talking about what I thought of the book, so if you haven’t read it STOP READING NOW. Seriously, SPOILER ALERT!!!

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A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Wow…just, wow. This book was incredible and so many things happened that I can’t even believe. I absolutely loved it and once again GRRM makes me feel like he’s some sort of crazy, evil, creative genius. As someone who loves writing and hopes to be a writer, he just blows my mind. Seriously, how can someone come up with this many plot lines? And they all are completely necessary and essential to wherever this story is going to end.

SERIOUSLY, I’ve never read a chapter from any of the books in the ASOIAF series and thought “GRRM could have done without this, it was a pretty pointless chapter.” These books are so detailed and all of the story lines are so well thought out, that even though I think I know where things are going, I’m shocked and I’m not mad about any of it.

Something that really made me think about all of this was when *SPOILER* Jon was stabbed after announcing to the brothers that he was going to return to Winterfell. After I got over my initial shock (Jon got stabbed! Is he dead?! This can’t happen!), I went online to see how others had reacted. I stumbled upon a site with the theory that Jon is Azor Ahai reborn (salty tears and smoking wounds, plus Melisandre’s visions). I had never even thought about that, but that wasn’t even the craziest thing about it. The site listed all of the theories surrounding Azor Ahai, and I had only thought there were two of them (Stannis and Daenerys). To have so many characters listed under the theories, there had to be some serious planning on GRRM’s part.

Everything has been planned out with so much detail, it’s no wonder it takes him so long to write these books. Reading the ASOIAF series and seeing the theories have made me fall in love with reading and writing again. I can’t wait for The Winds of Winter, and I look forward to seeing what GRRM does with the crazy world he created.