I’m experiencing two different timelines for Game of Thrones at the moment – the TV’s first season / first book, in the early days of the War of Kings – and the latest book, A Dance with Dragons, as I read through it on Kindle. It’s a bit surreal; as ever, I am enjoying both, although a point Amanda made to me rings through – the number of characters Martin creates in depth in the books is very hard to keep track of, and I’m struggling to remember who all the random Mereen are around Danaerys at the moment. Will need to find a quick-ref summary.

Scalzi has a fun analysis on why this book has taken so long for George R R Martin to write – at over 400,000 words, in essence, it is the length of four or five lesser books, which a man might have churned out at a rate of one a year. So he’s basically written 4 regular sized books, or two jumbo sized fantasy epics, in one. Sterling effort, my good man, sterling effort.