ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED

The explanation:

When I first created the original version of this reading order, I was in the middle of a re-read of the series and had 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 have been published, there are options available to us that never were before.

George R.R. Martin famously took years to finish Feast after Storm came out, and infamously took even more years to finish Dance after Feast came out. 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 something called “The Meereenese Knot.” To discuss this I’d have to get a little bit spoilery, but it boiled down to how to get a whole bunch of characters to the place where a certain other character was, and in what order, and whether to have all of them get there by the end of Dance, and what to do with the character toward whom they’re traveling while they’re on their way. 

As you’d quickly discover were you to read Feast as written, fans who read Storm when it came out had to wait a decade to find out how the stories of many of their favorite characters continued, since Martin decided to save those characters’ storylines for Dance — despite the fact that in story time, many of those storylines 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. Between the real-world delay and the weird sensation of following half the characters’ stories for a while in Feast before looping back in time to catch up with the other characters in Dance, reading that latter book can feel a little wonky for some readers. 

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 Feast and Dance simultaneously? They cover the same timespan – Feast starts a little earlier with some of the material centered on the Ironborn, and Dance 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. Several groups of characters split between them have storylines that parallel, echo, or comment on one another in revealing ways. 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. In trying to pick one over the others, I had a few criteria in mind.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. I did this differently for my original reading order, which is geared toward people who’ve already read the books. But for the purposes of this new reader–friendly version, I’m willing to make an exception to #1 & #2: Chapters can be read out of order if that helps preserve mysteries from one storyline that would otherwise be prematurely spoiled by another. The fewer changes necessary to accomplish this, the better.
4. 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.
5. 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, so I ended up making my own version instead.

[NOTE: Consider all the following links SPOILERY.] For the basic framework I took this list by SFFChronicles messageboard member Orionis, then reordered the chapters 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. From there, I crowdsourced refinements to the list via my original post, both for actual fixes (i.e. I messed up the timeline because I switched between the books too quickly or too slowly) and to make sure the chapters flowed in a pleasing way. I relied very heavily on Atanvarno’s list (explained here) as well as his direct feedback for these refinements, particularly the changes necessary to preserve the reveals. 

The end result seemed to fit my five criteria better than any of the other options:

1. 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.
2. 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. (I even kept big chunks of chapters together rather than flipping back and forth on a chapter to chapter basis — at first this was just a coincidence, but thinking about it, I think it’s a good way to maintain Martin’s original narrative flow.)
3. It does the bare minimum of reshuffling necessary to preserve mysteries and avoid spoiling reveals. I only had to list two chapters out of order to keep the one big spoilable reveal intact.
4. It’s clearly labeled and very easy to read, understand, and even alter, if you want.
5. I’ve explained my methodology to an almost embarrassingly comprehensive degree, so you can understand what the heck I did here.

Much more on how the list was created can be found in the original post, which again is spoilery for anyone who hasn’t already read the books. It contains an extensive list of updates and tweaks I’ve made to the list since originally posting it as well.

Happy reading — you’ve got a long road ahead of you!