The A Song Of Ice And Fire series is amazing. Yes, there is a lot of detail about families and feasts and such, but they all turn out to be essential to the plot in order to really understand what's going on and who is doing what and why when shit really goes down. There are so many great hidden details in the family history and stories and dreams too that turn up later in the series. There are hidden prophecies everywhere and details that all but lay out for you some major unanswered questions (such as Jon Snow's mother) and some great easter eggs for those paying attention.
The first book, A Game Of Thrones was great, but mostly serves as an introduction to most of the major players and sets things in motion.
The second book, A Clash of Kings was better than the first, but functionally serves to get the players in position for the third book. The TV series stayed true to the first season, but when they adapted this book for the second season they took massive liberties and completely changed Robb Stark's and Daenerys Targaryen's storylines, as well as the Battle of Blackwater, completely. The books handled these much better. The second season of the show also left out massive chunks of other characters stories, but it looks like they will be incorporated into the third season.
The third book, A Storm of Swords is just flat out fucking amazing. Massively epic. But long, something like 1500 pages. The tv show is going to split this into two seasons just so they can get to everything, plus parts of other characters stories that they glossed over in the second season. One of these seasons will win the show the Emmy for Best Drama. If they do a reasonable job of maintaining the storylines, Breaking Bad and Mad Men won't be able to compete. If you gave up reading the books here, you did yourself a major disservice. It's more than just recitations of family names and descriptions of feast food. Unless you are too damned slow to follow along...
The fourth book is when George R. R. Marten ran into story troubles and ended up scrapping the story multiple times and starting over. Then what he did write was over 2500 pages and he had to cull it down and actually split his expected story into two books, what would become A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons. He chose to split by region so the fourth book introduces a new region that the reader had previously known nothing about and focuses on characters who weren't really fan favorites, while the fifth book covers the fan favorite characters. The end result is fragmented, but it works if you read them back to back or concurrently, but when there was a 6-year gap between ASOS and AFFC and another 6-year gap between AFFC and ADWD, I can see where readers who followed the series from the beginning were quite frustrated.
The sixth book will probably be out in 2015 and the last planned book in the series by 2018. This gives HBO enough time to do an entire series run if they choose to, which by all indications, they are willing to do. The TV show is a monster hit moneymaker for them, so they have no reason to stop especially when the next two seasons cover the juiciest storylines in the whole series.
So yeah, I rambled. Read the books. They are far better than the show, which is fantastic in itself.
