A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Published 2011 · 1,040 pages · 420,000 words · about 29 hours at an average pace · Fantasy
How hard is A Dance with Dragons to read?
A Dance with Dragons scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 36 out of 100
- Martin uses medieval-flavored diction, heraldic terms and invented place and house names, but the prose is plain. It is closer to Beach Read's clarity than to anything archaic, with the many names the main barrier.
- Sentence structure: 33 out of 100
- Sentences are mostly short and direct, with close third-person voices per chapter. Dialogue-heavy scenes read easily, like the straightforward syntax of 1984.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Events are concrete: marches, councils, battles and feasts. Questions of rule and duty arise through scenes, not argument.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- Dozens of houses, two continents, parallel plotlines and many point-of-view characters demand constant tracking, nearing the plotted breadth of Anna Karenina though lighter in ideas.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Each chapter's narrator knows only part of the truth, so readers piece together plots and prophecies from partial views. Hidden identities and ambiguous visions add inference.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- Fire and ice, dragons, the Wall and prophecy carry recurring meaning, but they are signposted rather than obscure, similar to the clear allegory of 1984.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Martin's tone is mostly earnest, with sardonic wit from Tyrion and grim reversals of heroic expectation. The gap between what characters believe and what happens is clear.
- Resolution withholding: 86 out of 100
- This installment closes with cliffhangers and leaves the central conflicts unresolved, with the series itself unfinished. Jon, Daenerys and Tyrion all end in suspense.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Rotating point-of-view chapters, overlapping timelines with the previous volume, and multiple geographically separate plotlines create a complex structure, though each thread is chronological.
How A Dance with Dragons is regarded
A Dance with Dragons holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Hugo Award for Best Novel 2012, finalist