I let a week go by before writing about “A Feast for Crows“. I have mixed feelings about the book. With all that went on in “A Strom of Swords” one is left expecting what more has G.R.R. Martin has thought and how is this all going to end? Maybe this is why he was forced to split the continuation of the Storm into two books (three volumes actually) but I cannot help thinking that he has turned this into a cash cow. I quote from the Wikipedia page of the book:
In May 2005 Martin announced that the “sheer size” of his still-unfinished manuscript for A Feast for Crows had led him and his publishers to split the narrative into two books. Rather than divide the text in half chronologically, Martin opted to instead split the material by character and location, resulting in “two novels taking place simultaneously” with different casts of characters. A Feast for Crows was published months later, and the concurrent novel A Dance with Dragons was released on July 12, 2011. Martin also noted that the A Song of Ice and Fire series would now likely total seven novels.
At least it is not like what Brian Herbert did to the Dune saga.
Maybe after I read the two volumes of “A Dance with Dragons” I will look into this book more fondly.
Managing organized complexity 
It ‘s Frank Herbert.
No, it is Brian, Frank’s son who took it upon himself to write “Dune 7” (see my posts here and here), “The House Trilogy” and “Legends of Dune“. Consider yourself lucky if you have not read those, especially the Legends.
You are right. I have not.
Feast for Crows was the last one of the books I read (in 2005; I read them as they were coming out, starting all the way back to 2000).
The original plan, from what I remember, was 1 book per year, and GRRM kept it for a while. He slipped a bit between Swords & Feast (I think they were 2+ years apart). But then, the huge gap between Feast & Dance (6 years? Really?) plus the fact that I also detected a rehash of the material/plots/etc for the sake of prolonging the books (i.e. cash cow effect) made me decide NOT to buy Dance. Frankly even if I had bought Dance, I’d have to re-read at least Feast, to remember what was going on. 6 years is a long time…
Of course, now with the whole HBO thing, maybe GRRM will actually decide to finally finish the series. We’ll see.