http://boiledleather.com/post/24543217702/a-proposed-a-feast-for-crows-a-dance-with-dragons
A proposed A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons merged reading order, with explanation [uPDATED x2]
NB: This post is intended for people who have already read both books, as are its recommendations for the combined order.
The order:
- Prologue (Varamyr): ADWD 1
- Prologue (Pate): AFFC 1
- The Prophet (Aeron I): AFFC 2
- The Captain of Guards (Areo I): AFFC 3
- Cersei I: AFFC 4
- Brienne I: AFFC 5
- Tyrion I: ADWD 2
- Daenerys I: ADWD 3
- Jon I: ADWD 4
- Bran I: ADWD 5
- Tyrion II: ADWD 6
- The Merchant’s Man (Quentyn I): ADWD 7
- Samwell I: AFFC 6
- Jon II: ADWD 8
- Arya I: AFFC 7
- Cersei II: AFFC 8
- Jaime I: AFFC 9
- Brienne II: AFFC 10
- Sansa I: AFFC 11
- The Kraken’s Daughter (Asha I): AFFC 12
- Tyrion III: ADWD 9
- Davos I: ADWD 10
- Jon III: ADWD 11
- Daenerys II: ADWD 12
- Reek I (Theon I): ADWD 13
- Cersei III: AFFC 13
- The Soiled Knight (Arys): AFFC 14
- Bran II: ADWD 14
- Tyrion IV: ADWD 15
- Davos II: ADWD 16
- Brienne III: AFFC 15
- Samwell II: AFFC 16
- Daenerys III: ADWD 17
- Jon IV: ADWD 18
- Tyrion V: ADWD 19
- Davos III: ADWD 20
- Jaime II: AFFC 17
- Cersei IV: AFFC 18
- The Iron Captain (Victarion I): AFFC 19
- The Drowned Man (Aeron II): AFFC 20
- Brienne IV: AFFC 21
- The Queenmaker (Arianne I): AFFC 22
- Arya II: AFFC 23
- Reek II (Theon II): ADWD 21
- Jon V: ADWD 22
- Tyrion VI: ADWD 23
- Daenerys IV: ADWD 24
- Alayne I (Sansa II): AFFC 24
- Cersei V: AFFC 25
- The Lost Lord (Jon Connington I): ADWD 25
- The Windblown (Quentyn II): ADWD 26
- The Wayward Bride (Asha II): ADWD 27
- Brienne V: AFFC 26
- Samwell III: AFFC 27
- Jaime III: AFFC 28
- Tyrion VII: ADWD 28
- Jon VI: ADWD 29
- Davos IV: ADWD 30
- Cersei VI: AFFC 29
- The Reaver (Victarion II): AFFC 30
- Daenerys V: ADWD 31
- Melisandre I: ADWD 32
- Jaime IV: AFFC 31
- Brienne VI: AFFC 32
- Reek III (Theon III): ADWD 33
- Tyrion VIII: ADWD 34
- Cersei VII: AFFC 33
- Jaime V: AFFC 34
- Cat of the Canals (Arya III): AFFC 35
- Samwell IV: AFFC 36
- Cersei VIII: AFFC 37
- Brienne VII: AFFC 38
- Jaime VI: AFFC 39
- Cersei IX: AFFC 40
- The Princess in the Tower (Arianne II): AFFC 41
- Bran III: ADWD 35
- Jon VII: ADWD 36
- Daenerys VI: ADWD 37
- The Prince of Winterfell (Theon IV): ADWD 38
- The Watcher (Areo II): ADWD 39
- Jon VIII: ADWD 40
- Tyrion IX: ADWD 41
- The Turncloak (Theon V): ADWD 42
- The King’s Prize (Asha III): ADWD 43
- Daenerys VII: ADWD 44
- Alayne II (Sansa III): AFFC 42
- Jon IX: ADWD 45
- The Blind Girl (Arya IV): ADWD 46
- A Ghost in Winterfell (Theon VI): ADWD 47
- Tyrion X: ADWD 48
- Brienne VIII: AFFC 43
- Cersei X: AFFC 44
- Jaime VII: AFFC 45
- Samwell V: AFFC 46
- Jaime VIII: ADWD 49
- Jon X: ADWD 50
- Daenerys VIII: ADWD 51
- Theon VII: ADWD 52
- Daenerys IX: ADWD 53
- Jon XI: ADWD 54
- Cersei XI: ADWD 55
- The Queensguard (Barristan I): ADWD 56
- The Iron Suitor (Victarion III): ADWD 57
- Tyrion XI: ADWD 58
- Jon XII: ADWD 59
- The Discarded Knight (Barristan II): ADWD 60
- The Spurned Suitor (Quentyn III): ADWD 61
- The Griffin Reborn (Jon Connington II): ADWD 62
- The Sacrifice (Asha IV): ADWD 63
- Victarion IV: ADWD 64
- The Ugly Little Girl (Arya V): ADWD 65
- Cersei XII: ADWD 66
- Tyrion XII: ADWD 67
- The Kingbreaker (Barristan III): ADWD 68
- The Dragontamer (Quentyn IV): ADWD 69
- Jon XIII: ADWD 70
- The Queen’s Hand (Barristan IV): ADWD 71
- Daenerys X: ADWD 72
- Epilogue (Kevan): ADWD 73
The explanation:I’m rereading the series and just finished A Storm of Swords. At a certain point along the way I got to thinking about how to approach A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Now that both books exist, there are options available to us that never were before.
Martin infamously took years to finish Feast after Storm, and even more years to finish Dance after Feast. As we know, this came down to several problems. First, he’d intended to have a five-year jump in the narrative following the conclusion of Storm, but after about a year of writing he realized it wasn’t working and had to start over. Then, once he’d started over, he discovered that while the five-year jump didn’t work for most of the storylines, it worked really well for a few, and it was hard to get them right without it. Then he realized that he had way too many characters and way too much story to fit in one volume as planned, and he needed to decide how to split one volume into two – should he tell half the story for all the characters, or (nearly) all the story for half the characters? (He chose the latter solution.) Finally, he struggled with “The Meereenese Knot”: How to get everyone on the hunt for Daenerys to Meereen, and in what order, and whether to try to have them all arrive by the end of Dance, and what to do with them once they got there, and what to do with Daenerys and company in the interim.
So fans who read Storm when it came out had to wait a decade to find out how the stories of Jon, Daenerys, and Tyrion continued, despite the fact that in story time Jon and Tyrion’s tales in particular pick up almost immediately after we left them. Even someone like me, who was late to the party and first read the series about a year, year and a half before Dance ended up coming out, had a delay. In my case it was a delay long enough to read the entire series, then read it over again, then have a month or two to wait before Dance came out.
I know I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, but what I want to convey more than the details of the production or reception of the novels is how distant the various real-world reasons for the delay between the end of Storm and the beginning of Dance made the events of those books feel in story time. Rereading Storm just now, some of this hit me like a lightning bolt. Like “Holy shit, Jon is a 17-year-old during his stint as Lord Commander, not a guy in his mid-20s who’s years older than when the story started.” It felt that way to me because of the delay, but it’s not true of the story at all. It just feels like it’s been years.
Ditto Tyrion: It can be jarring to see what an alcoholic mess he is at the beginning of Dance, but only because the immediate impact of the events that befall him at the end of Storm—betrayed by his wife (at least that’s what he believes), betrayed by his girlfriend, abandoned by his father and uncle, wrongfully convicted of kinslaying and kingslaying, freed by his beloved brother only to discover that Jaime had lied about the young wife in whose gang-rape Tyrion was forced by his father to participate, lying to Jaime about killing Joffrey, murdering his girlfriend, murdering his father, and beginning a life on the run—has been diluted by the amount of time that passed between reading all of that and reading about him in his full drunken “where do whores go” glory.
Here’s where it changes.
Right now, for the first time, the only real-world delay necessary to endure between reading, say, Jon’s last chapter in Storm and his first in Dance is the amount of time it takes you to read the entirety of Feast and get to the beginning of Dance after you’ve finished Storm, since Martin split the characters up between the two books.
But since we now have access to both books at once, what’s to stop us from folding the stories back together, re-reading Feastand Dance simultaneously? They cover the same timespan – Feast starts a little earlier, with the Iron Islands material, andDance goes a little later, with everything in the final third or so of the book, but they mostly overlap.
Moreover, as my colleague Stefan Sasse has persuasively argued, the two books are thematically as well as temporally congruent. Cersei’s attempt to rule in Feast is echoed by Jon’s and Dany’s in Dance, from their very similar opening scenes on down. Brienne’s quest in Feast is echoed by the quests of Quentyn, Tyrion, and Bran in Dance, too. In other words it’s quite possible, and profitable, to consider them as one giant book. Why not make it so?
Figuring that ASoIaF fandom has covered every possible base – not just first, second, third, and home, but bases I don’t even know exist, like fifth, nineteenth, and quarmty-secondth – I asked around and discovered that several proposed A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons merged reading orders are out there:
This one by Orionis at the SFFChronicles message board (seemingly propsed to him by some unnamed source) and this Google Doc by redditor Juicyjames were the most frequently suggested options. There’s also this very in-depth exploration of the idea by Miranche (aka Stinky Steward from Westeros) at Whittling, another SFFChronicles message-board proposal by TDK, this proposal by alayne25 on the Westeros forum, and another, more in-depth Westeros-forum proposal by Atanvarno. None of them appear to be considered definitive by the fandom. (To wit, I asked Elio Garcia of Westeros, whom I trust implicitly on such matters, if he knew of a good way to go about merging the books, and he told me he hasn’t seen one he really likes as yet, though he may attempt one himself in the future.)
In trying to pick one over the others, I had a few criteria in mind.
-
I want to read something that’s in rough chronological order, rather than following half the characters to (nearly) the end of the story, then going back to the starting line with the other half of the characters. That’s the whole point, obviously.
- But I don’t want to read something that’s in strict chonological order, to the point where people are radically re-ordering the chapters even within the context of a single book. I want something that preserves Martin’s original flow as much as possible given the caveat that once the decision was made to split the books he wrote them with that in mind, not something that puts the 9th chapter of Feast featuring Character X after the 20th chapter of Feast featuring Character Y because that’s when it technically takes place. If Martin had wanted to roll out the chapters in strict chronological order he’d have done so, up to and including putting the first few chapters of both books somewhere inside Storm.
- Yet I also don’t want to read something that hews so closely to Martin’s original intent that it works overtime not to spoil reveals in the storyline of Character A late during Feast because they’re discussed by Character B early on in Dance. The best example there is how Quentyn’s first chapter from Dance would fall near the beginning of a mergedFeast/Dance megabook, thus “spoiling” Prince Doran’s revelation of his secret plan for vengeance from the end of Feastand now near the late-middle of the merged Feast/Dance. I’ve already read both books and know what’s coming, so I have no problem with blown reveals, not if it would require radically reordering chapters to preserve them.
- This isn’t a narrative concern but a logistical one: I want a guide that’s easy to follow and easy to fiddle with if I feel like fiddling with it. Clearly labeling each chapter with the book, character, chapter number for that character specifically, and chapter number for the book overall will make it easiest to do that.
- On some level it’d be nice to understand why this particular order was assembled and suggested – the methodology behind it, any problems the compiler feels they solved or failed to solve, and so on. Not necessary, but nice.
None of the proposals quite fit the bill. The Orionis/SFFChronicles was the clearest to read and featured Orionis’s own endorsement of the proposed order as a reader, but some chapters were still reordered, and there wasn’t much by way of explanation. The Google Doc was
radically reordering the chapters. The Whittling list was based mainly on the idea of making longer versions of either
Feast or
Dance, so combining them was an afterthought; I’m also just personally skeptical of anyone who suggests Quentyn is a waste of time. TDK’s SFFChronicles list actually enlightened me on Orionis’s methodology in contrast to its own, though the list itself was in a hard-to-follow format. Alayne25 seemed to be proceeding fairly straightforwardly but there’s no real way to judge the ordering based on the information given. Atanyarno made the intriguing suggestion of pulling out the Ironborn/kingsmoot and Arianne/Areo/Dorne stuff entirely and reading it as a novella before doing the merged read, which I think would work well with the Ironborn stuff in particular but which would defeat the purpose of picking up with all the
Dance characters as soon after finishing
Storm as possible; and again, if Martin had wanted the Ironborn stuff to all be read before the rest of the story, since that’s when it technically takes place, he’d have done so.
So I ended up making my own version instead. It’s basically just Orionis’s list, with chapters reordered so that you bounce back and forth between the two books but never read chapters from within one book or the other out of order. (I also added the real names and character-chapter numbers to many of Dance‘s shifting-name chapters, which Orionis hadn’t done.) This seemed to fit my five criteria better than any of the other options:
-
It has rough chronology, so you pick up with most every character across the board at roughly the same time afterStorm left off and keep going with all of them until they each run out of chapters.
-
It doesn’t have strict chronology, so you’re not radically re-ordering the chapters despite what Martin felt was the best reading order when assembling the books originally.
- It keeps the chapters in order rather than monkeying around to preserve reveals I’m already aware of.
- It’s clearly labeled and very easy to read, understand, and even alter, if you want.
- I’ve explained my methodology to an almost embarrassingly comprehensive degree, so you can understand what the heck I did here.
To be clear, I have no especial expertise in the events of each chapter, or whether the order I just assembled will present events in an intelligible, pleasing way. It seems like it
ought to, though. And I’m happy to crowdsource the refinement of it – if you look this over and think a change would make it better, please let me know.
I start tonight. Looking forward to it!
UPDATE 01: Per commenter Charles R, my original version had “The Watcher,” which takes place after “The Princess in the Tower,” come before it in the reading order. I’ve therefore moved “Cersei IX” and “The Princess in the Tower” in between “Jaime VI” and “The Prince of Winterfell,” preserving both chronology and chapter order. Thanks, Charles!
UPDATE 02: Upon further reflection and an edit by Charles R to his proposed solution, I moved “Bran III,” “Jon VII,” and “Daenerys VI” to fit in between “The Princess in the Tower” and “The Prince of Winterfell,” to give “Princess” and “The Watcher” a little more distance between them.
