This is the third book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series. Here you can find my reviews for the first two: A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. I haven’t hated the series, but I also haven’t been hugely fond of it. The second book felt like a definitive step up from the first… but the third one isn’t exactly an improvement.

This book is about a thousand pages long (no exaggeration) so you’re stuck with it for the long haul if you decide to start reading. But, to its credit, there are some interesting events that occur throughout the book which help to pass the time by. Even non-Game of Thrones fans have probably heard about the infamous “Red Wedding” and it’s in this book in which it occurs. It was pretty surprising – though I wasn’t all that moved by it because I didn’t feel enormously invested in the characters it happened to. I’d say there are a lot of characters in this book who I’m mostly indifferent to.

Nonetheless, that’s not true of everybody. I still enjoyed Tyrion Lannister, who tries to change things in this horrible world for the greater good. His storyline continued to interest me – particularly the way in which he crossed paths with Sansa Stark. This book also gives us chapters from the perspective of Jamie Lannister – someone who I really disliked at first, but who slowly seemed to become more likeable as he seemed to come to realise the corruption of his world. For most of his story, he is escorted by Brienne of Tarth, a female knight. Really irritatingly, the book is full of endless references to her being very “ugly” and it seems that George R. R. Martin is keen for his readers to know whether or not a woman is conventionally attractive as he goes on about it all the time. However, I did actually quite like Brienne as she was one of the few actually likeable characters in the whole thing.

Other things I enjoyed included adding Samwell Tarly as a perspective character. He was always a nice, sensitive character and I appreciated him getting more focus. His personality type is quite rare in this world. Arya Stark also continued to be an interesting and likeable character, making her way around the hostile world as a scrappy young girl.

However, positives aside, this was still a very flawed book. He continues to write all of his female characters in a leery, creepy sort of way and I found myself shaking my head in disappointment at it countless times. We get a lot of insight into the backstories of the characters in this book, which can be interesting, but often felt pretty forced – with characters just randomly recounting a long story from their past every now and then and it happens quite a few times too. Some of them felt a little needlessly detailed too – which is a good comment on the book overall. There’s so much detail on clothes, food, rooms and all kinds of other things. If a strict editor looked through it, I reckon a couple hundred pages could have been trimmed.

Overall, I don’t think this was an improvement over the second book. In fact, I’d say it was just a little bit worse, mainly because it was several hundred pages longer and there was more of it for me to get through. Some interesting developments for sure, but, boy, is it a slog.

Rating: 6.3/10

Buy it here.

I’m sure you’re probably familiar with the theory that the Earth was visited by advanced aliens in ancient times and that they guided the early civilisations who saw them as gods. It’s a fun concept for science fiction stories, but there are certainly some people who sincerely believe that this may have happened. One of these people is Erich von Däniken and in his book, Chariots of the Gods, he takes several examples from history in an attempt to argue his case. Though he wasn’t the first person to argue this case, he’s definitely one of the most well known advocates of the ancient astronaut theory.

Going into the book, I was open minded. I love historic mysteries and it’s statistically more likely that we’re not alone in the universe than that we are. I don’t think that it’s impossible to imagine that alien beings have visited the planet at some point in its long history. I thought it would be fun to read through some interesting unexplained phenomenon and entertain the notion that extra-terrestrials might be the explanation.

I was actually quite excited to start… only to have that enthusiasm immediately killed by three very long and bitter forewords and introductions. It seems that Von Däniken has not taken criticism of his work very well and all of these opening pieces were just angry rants about how people need to be more open-minded and so on. These felt really long and, honestly, they were kind of uncomfortable to read. Definitely not a good first impression.

By then I got into the main body of the book, mentally rubbing my hands with glee at the thought of all the historic mysteries I was going to find out about… Only to find that the bulk of his arguments boiled down to “How could primitive people possibly have done this by themselves?” and, yes, some of the things he were talking about made me think “Wow, that’s a really good question, how did they build that?” but it just made me think that there were probably methods they developed out of necessity in ways we don’t understand anymore. Some of the arguments were very tenuous, for example, he pointed to God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah in The Bible as an example, saying that it could be a “primitive” mind’s account for seeing aliens destroy a town with a nuclear bomb… but why would aliens want to nuke a random ancient city?

Additionally, there was a lot of creepy casual sexism. He talks about how it would be natural for human astronauts to encounter ‘primitive’ alien women on a planet and select the best specimens for fertilisation… excuse me? So humans are exploring space just so they can rape female aliens? Jeez. Another time, he says something along the lines of a simple housewife having the same intelligence as a simple farmer a few hundred years ago… not very respectful to anybody!

What I will say in this book’s favour is that it highlighted some interesting facts about the possibility of life on alien planets. For example, he explained that tests had proven that a form of life could exist on the planet Jupiter, which is fascinating to me. He also drew my attention to some beautiful pieces of art, architecture and technology from the ancient world which I really enjoyed learning about… just because I don’t think that their existence constitutes an argument for alien intervention, doesn’t mean I don’t like reading about them!

Ultimately, I don’t think I can recommend this book. By all means, give it a try and make up your own mind, maybe you’ll be convinced that aliens really did once walk among us, but in my opinion, he comes to all kinds of alien conclusions based on practically nothing while also coming off as mildly racist and sexist.

Rating: 4.7/10

Buy it here.