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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 790643" data-attributes="member: 6533">I think they're very good books.  Opinion about them is odd, however.  There are a lot of people who don't like them and I have a limited ability to predict or see a trend as to who fits in that category.Nonetheless, I recommend them to everyone and most of my friends who have read them loved them.  They do diverge in some very fundamental ways from the majority of the established genres for fantasy, and I have known some people who have been pretty offended by that.  Particularly the, to some, surprisingly high levels of sex, violence, and classical issues (bastards, incest, madness, scary magic, loyalty, harsh justice, all those things the Greeks put in plays). Overall they are very popular so I don't guess this is a general projection.I think that the most fundamental shift in these books from standard conventions is that they seem much more rooted in theatrical traditions of narrative than nearly all fantasy fiction.  If Tolkien was trying to bring Beowulf and the Song of Roland into the novel than George is trying to do the same thing with the Henriad, Macbeth, and medieval anthologies.Oddly, I and most of my friends believe the first book is the least well written of the series and that the level of writing shoots up dramatically for the second book.As I said, reaction to these books is surprising.</blockquote>