I still think A Storm of Swords is the best of the bunch so far, but I'm going to try reading these last two books in chronological order when I do a reread and see if that helps with some of the pacing issues or makes them worse, lol.

For what it is worth, I think the two books *do* hold up a lot better when read as a single massive volume; there are some very interesting thematic parallels at play (Dany and Cersei chapters in immediate succession, comparing how each handles ruling a city, for a start) and a few interesting little hints towards the future which are easier to put together when the evidence is collected together.

There's a few rival versions of the collected reading order, as people have been left to work things out based on context clues and so forth, but this one is my preferred version (link goes to a list of chapters):

http://afeastwithdragons.com/

It's not - a lot of the reviews are coming, to put it bluntly, from an understandable place of bitterness that this new release isn't Winds of Winter :p there's a vast amount of information found in the one which is not in the other, and visa versa.

Summarising the book as best as possible without giving spoilers, but ROT13 in case you don't want even that:

WORLD - qvfphffrf gur ceruvfgbel bs Cynargbf, gura napvrag uvfgbel, gura gur Gnetnelra pbadhrfg, gura fhzznevfrf gur ervta bs rnpu Gnetnelra zbanepu, gura tvirf qrgnvyrq vasbezngvba ba rnpu ertvba bs Jrfgrebf naq gura zber inthr vasbezngvba ba gur jvqre jbeyq.

326 pages in total.

F&B - tvirf qrgnvyrq nppbhagf bs gur Gnetnelra pbadhrfg naq gur svefg rvtug Gnetnelra zbanepuf.

736 pages in total.

To be fair, there IS a single chapter of World which *is* repeated verbatim in F&B (pbirevat gur Pbadhrfg) but to give you an idea of what percentage this is, the Audible audiobook lasts 26 hours and this repeated segment covers 45 minutes of this.

In other words, I suggest you read both :)

The same goes for a novella called "The Sons of the Dragon", by the by.

Note: I'll be finishing this up next week. I will be reading the other shorts/novellas "The Rogue Prince" and "The Princess and the Queen" but I'm not sure when. Probably not next month, unless I have extra time for it, so probably January. I don't know if I'll do official Reads of them though. It'll probably be more like what I did with the Dunk & Egg stories.

It's worth noting that you might want to hold off on reading these two novellas if you have any intention whatsoever of ever reading the newly-published Fire and Blood, as both are abridged extracts from this book. As such, if you read the novellas and subsequently the new volume, you would find portions of text you'll have already read.

Now would be a good time to note that you inadvertently used a spoiler image for this chapter to illustrate one of these threads about 6 weeks ago.... ;)

You didn't write it down :p I checked your post from when you last encountered him. I'll post the answer in ROT13, veiled enough that it isn't obvious without translating the cypher.

Ur vf, va snpg, Oelaqra Eviref nxn Oybbqenira - abgr gur zragvba bs "gubhfnaq rlrf naq bar" naq n erq oybgpu ba uvf snpr.

but the whole thing about Klingons having the technology to change their physiology to human enough to fool surface tests is ridiculous.

Your point about the Dollhouse technology is spot on, but regarding the above - this has already been seen to some extent, as far back as The Trouble With Tribbles in TOS.

The former, as is the UK standard.

So as I begin my thirtieth (28th, in terms of the “official” count) Discworld book

Slight miscount here; this is the 29th Discworld book you have covered in total and the 28th official entry in the series, as The Last Hero is included in the latter list.

There are a smattering of tuatara in zoological collections outside New Zealand - about a dozen collections in the USA (including San Diego Zoo, which is the only non-NZ collection to hold the Brothers Island race) and two in Europe. One of these European collections - Chester Zoo here in the United Kingdom - is the first and only place to have bred the species outside New Zealand, and due to this fact has quite a lot of them!