"A Game of Thrones" and "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin
I'm getting a little more caught up with these quick-takes -- I read these around Thanksgiving. (Well, and a couple weeks before... and after. They're long!) I don't normally spend a lot of time in the genre, in part because it's so hard to make its conventions feel fresh.
The Game of Thrones series does pretty well on that score, with a large cast of distinct and memorable characters, a good balance of plot vs backstory/mythology (once you get past the beginning of the first one, which starts slowly), and giving us a little dose of supernatural/mystical elements to make things interesting without getting too baroque.
That said, I had a couple misgivings that interfered with my ability to just sit back and enjoy the series. First off, the racial politics suck. I understand that when you set your series in a loose allegory for medieval Europe -- with side-journeys to loose allegories for the Islamic world and the central Asian steppe -- it means that almost all of your main characters will be "golden-haired" or "flaxen-haired" or have "shining blue eyes" or other general features of white people.
Now,I'm prepared to let the "wow, nobody looks like me" representation issue slide, because nobody came here to relive my childhood traumas (least of all me). That said, Martin's books go a little bit overboard with the Other-izing of the non-Westeros-ian people: we get a large cast of unsympathetic cardboard characters whose cultures just happen to fall into some worn-out stereotypes. I can't say that I know the author's heart or anything, but it was pretty lazy, especially in light of the more complicated sympathies bestowed on the various factions of Westeros.
The other major misgiving I had is one that I think it's clear the author is aware of, but that defies easy resolution. Namely, when you're writing a book that gives a nuanced treatment of the thirty-or-so most powerful and important people in society, it's easy to lose sight of how the 95% of people on the bottom layer of the feudal pyramid feel about things. And like I mentioned in my post about "Nothing to Envy", an academic emphasis on the history of ordinary people means it's always in the back of my mind.
Seriously, though, given that all of the important Houses in the books are constantly calling their peasants to take up arms, travel hundreds of miles away, and probably die of infection while the home village is getting sacked and burned by someone else's peasants... let's just say if I were scratching out a living making barrels, I wouldn't give two shits whether the guy issuing the decree that basically ends my worldly existence has a fish or a lion on his shield. So maybe one of them is a nicer guy to his direct subordinates -- a random village cooper has essentially a zero chance of having enough contact with him to tell the difference. They all probably levy about equally awful taxes on agricultural and artisanal production, too, and there's no question said taxes will only be more heinous as a result of wartime expenditures. And if 95% of the people in their society are indifferent to the outcome of all the Machiavellian maneuvering by those elite 30, it's going to distract me, too.