Pages 1-100
Pages 101-200
Pages 201-300
Pages 301-400:
1. "Oh, Cersei is lovely to look at, truly, but cold... the way she guards her cunt, you'd think she had all the gold of Casterly Rock between her legs. Here, give me that beer if you won't drink it."
Were we supposed to be sad when Robert Baratheon died? If so, why? Even through Ned's eyes, he's shown to be a drunkard, irresponsible, impolite, crude, and generally unpleasant - and Ned is supposedly one of his closest friends. He's never given positive characterization that might, you know, make him three-dimensional (unless you count when Ned is mourning for him, in which case it all reads like ret-con).
2. To be honest, I only had three things marked in this section, and upon reexamining them, I decided I don't want to include the other two here. In one case, it's just that at this point I feel that I've posted a lot of crude stuff from this book to my blog, and I really don't want to put too much of it up. Instead, I will say this: the book, all of it, is really unbearably crude. Not 'crude for art's sake' or 'crude because the characters should talk like that', because it's throughout the whole thing and used tastelessly. I've heard this described as a 'soap opera for men' and I think that's exactly right, especially as it plays off of some stereotypes of men the way soap operas play off of sterotypes of women - as they seem to expect all women to thrive on emotional drama and long smooches, this book serves up a big dish of sterotypically male fare like blood! sex! cussing! crude descriptions of female genitalia! I refuse to believe that men are that simple - none of the ones I know are, at least.
