A proposed A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons merged reading order, with explanation (and Dorne Reveal variant) [UPDATED x8]
NB: This post is intended for people who have already read both books, as are its recommendations for the combined order. SPOILERS AHEAD. For a new-reader-friendly version, click here.
Prologue (Varamyr): ADWD 1
The Prophet (Aeron I): AFFC 2
The Captain of Guards (Areo I): AFFC 3
The Merchantās Man (Quentyn I): ADWD 7 ^
The Krakenās Daughter (Asha I): AFFC 12
Reek I (Theon I): ADWD 13
The Soiled Knight (Arys): AFFC 14
The Iron Captain (Victarion I): AFFC 19
The Drowned Man (Aeron II): AFFC 20
The Queenmaker (Arianne I): AFFC 22
Alayne I (Sansa II): AFFC 24
Reek II (Theon II): ADWD 21
The Lost Lord (Jon Connington I): ADWD 25
The Windblown (Quentyn II): ADWD 26
The Wayward Bride (Asha II): ADWD 27
The Reaver (Victarion II): AFFC 30
Reek III (Theon III): ADWD 33
Cat of the Canals (Arya III): AFFC 35
The Princess in the Tower (Arianne II): AFFC 41 ^
The Prince of Winterfell (Theon IV): ADWD 38
The Watcher (Areo II): ADWD 39
The Turncloak (Theon V): ADWD 42
The Kingās Prize (Asha III): ADWD 43
Alayne II (Sansa III): AFFC 42
The Blind Girl (Arya IV): ADWD 46
A Ghost in Winterfell (Theon VI): ADWD 47
The Queensguard (Barristan I): ADWD 56
The Iron Suitor (Victarion III): ADWD 57
The Discarded Knight (Barristan II): ADWD 60
The Spurned Suitor (Quentyn III): ADWD 61
The Griffin Reborn (Jon Connington II): ADWD 62
The Sacrifice (Asha IV): ADWD 63
The Ugly Little Girl (Arya V): ADWD 65
The Kingbreaker (Barristan III): ADWD 68
The Dragontamer (Quentyn IV): ADWD 69
The Queenās Hand (Barristan IV): ADWD 71
Epilogue (Kevan): ADWD 73
^ The Dorne Reveal Variant:
To preserve the revelation that Quentyn Martellās on a mission to Daenerys until after Prince Doran reveals it to Princess Arianne rather than allowing it to proceed chronologically, simply take The Princess in the Tower/Arianne II (#75) and The Merchantās Man/Quentyn I (#12) and put them after Alayne I/Sansa II (#44): Alayne I/The Princess in the Tower/The Merchantās Man.
Iām rereading the series and just finishedĀ A Storm of Swords.Ā At a certain point along the way I got to thinking about how to approachĀ A Feast for CrowsĀ andĀ A Dance with Dragons. Now that both books exist, there are options available to us that never were before.
Martin infamously took years to finishĀ FeastĀ afterĀ Storm, and even more years to finishĀ DanceĀ afterĀ Feast. As we know, this came down to several problems. First, heād intended to have a five-year jump in the narrative following the conclusion ofĀ Storm, but after about a year of writing he realized it wasnāt working and had to start over. Then, once heād started over, he discovered that while the five-year jump didnāt work for most of the storylines, it worked really well for a few, and it was hard to get them right without it.Ā ThenĀ 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 ā 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 āThe Meereenese Knotā: How to get everyone on the hunt for Daenerys to Meereen, and in what order, and whether to try to have them all arrive by the end ofĀ Dance, and what to do with them once they got there, and what to do with Daenerys and company in the interim.
So fans who readĀ StormĀ when it came out had to wait a decade to find out how the stories of Jon, Daenerys, and Tyrion continued, despite the fact that in story time Jon and Tyrionās tales in particular 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 beforeĀ DanceĀ 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 beforeĀ DanceĀ came out.
I know Iām probably not telling you anything you donāt already know, but what I want to convey more than the details of the production or reception of the novels is how distant the various real-world reasons for the delay between the end ofĀ StormĀ and the beginning ofĀ DanceĀ made the events of those books feelĀ in story time. RereadingĀ StormĀ just now, some of this hit me like a lightning bolt. Like āHoly shit, Jon is a 17-year-old during his stint as Lord Commander, not a guy in his mid-20s whoās years older than when the story started.ā It felt that way to me because of the delay, but itās not true of the story at all. It just feels like itās been years.
Ditto Tyrion: It can be jarring to see what an alcoholic mess he is at the beginning ofĀ Dance, but only because the immediate impact of the events that befall him at the end ofĀ Stormābetrayed by his wife (at least thatās what he believes), betrayed by his girlfriend, abandoned by his father and uncle, wrongfully convicted of kinslaying and kingslaying, freed by his beloved brother only to discover that Jaime had lied about the young wife in whose gang-rape Tyrion was forced by his father to participate, lying to Jaime about killing Joffrey, murdering his girlfriend, murdering his father, and beginning a life on the runāhas been diluted by the amount of time that passed between reading all of that and reading about him in his full drunken āwhere do whores goā glory.
Hereās where it changes.
Right now, for the first time, the only real-world delay necessary to endure between reading, say, Jonās last chapter inĀ StormĀ and his first inĀ DanceĀ is the amount of time it takes you to read the entirety ofĀ FeastĀ and get to the beginning ofĀ DanceĀ after youāve finishedĀ Storm,Ā since Martin split the characters up between the two books.
But since we now have access to both books at once, whatās to stop us from folding the stories back together, re-readingĀ FeastandĀ DanceĀ simultaneously? They cover the same timespan āĀ FeastĀ starts a little earlier, with the Iron Islands material, andDanceĀ goes a little later, with everything in the final third or so of the book, but they mostly overlap.
Moreover,Ā as my colleague Stefan Sasse has persuasively argued, the two books areĀ thematicallyĀ as well asĀ temporallyĀ congruent. Cerseiās attempt to rule inĀ FeastĀ is echoed by Jonās and Danyās inĀ Dance, from their very similar opening scenes on down. Brienneās quest inĀ FeastĀ is echoed by the quests of Quentyn, Tyrion, and Bran inĀ Dance, too. In other words itās 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 ā not just first, second, third, and home, but bases I donāt even know exist, like fifth, nineteenth, and quarmty-secondth ā I asked around and discovered that several proposedĀ A Feast for Crows/A Dance with DragonsĀ merged reading orders are out there:
This one by Orionis at the SFFChronicles message boardĀ (seemingly propsed to him by some unnamed source) andĀ this Google DocĀ byĀ redditor JuicyjamesĀ were the most frequently suggested options. Thereās alsoĀ this very in-depth exploration of the idea by Miranche (aka Stinky Steward from Westeros) at Whittling,Ā another SFFChronicles message-board proposal by TDK,Ā this proposal by alayne25 on the Westeros forum, andĀ another, more in-depth Westeros-forum proposal by Atanvarno. None of them appear to be considered definitive by the fandom. (To wit, I asked Elio Garcia of Westeros, whom I trust implicitly on such matters, if he knew of a good way to go about merging the books, andĀ he told meĀ he hasnāt seen one he really likes as yet, though he may attempt one himself in the future.)
In trying to pick one over the others, I had a few criteria in mind.
I want to read something thatās 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. Thatās the whole point, obviously.
ButĀ I donāt want to read something thatās inĀ strictĀ 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 Martinās 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 ofĀ FeastĀ featuring Character X after the 20th chapter ofĀ FeastĀ featuring Character Y because thatās when it technically takes place. If Martin had wanted to roll out the chapters in strict chronological order heād have done so, up to and including putting the first few chapters of both books somewhere insideĀ Storm.
Yet I also donāt want to read something that hews so closely to Martinās original intent that it works overtime not to spoil reveals in the storyline of Character A late duringĀ FeastĀ because theyāre discussed by Character B early on inĀ Dance. The best example there is how Quentynās first chapter fromĀ DanceĀ would fall near the beginning of a mergedFeast/DanceĀ megabook, thus āspoilingā Prince Doranās revelation of his secret plan for vengeance from the end ofĀ Feastand now near the late-middle of the mergedĀ Feast/Dance.Ā Iāve already read both books and know whatās coming, so I have no problem with blown reveals, not if it would require radically reordering chapters to preserve them.
This isnāt a narrative concern but a logistical one: I want a guide thatāsĀ easy to follow and easy to fiddle withĀ 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.
On some level itād be nice to understand why this particular order was assembled and suggestedĀ ā 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. The Orionis/SFFChronicles was the clearest to read and featured Orionisās own endorsement of the proposed order as a reader, but some chapters were still reordered, and there wasnāt much by way of explanation. The Google Doc wasĀ radicallyĀ reordering the chapters. The Whittling list was based mainly on the idea of making longer versions of eitherĀ FeastĀ orĀ Dance, so combining them was an afterthought; Iām also just personally skeptical of anyone who suggests Quentyn is a waste of time. TDKās SFFChronicles list actually enlightened me on Orionisās methodology in contrast to its own, though the list itself was in a hard-to-follow format. Alayne25 seemed to be proceeding fairly straightforwardly but thereās no real way to judge the ordering based on the information given. Atanyarno made the intriguing suggestion of pulling out the Ironborn/kingsmoot and Arianne/Areo/Dorne stuff entirely and reading it as a novella before doing the merged read, which I think would work well with the Ironborn stuff in particular but which would defeat the purpose of picking up with all theĀ DanceĀ characters as soon after finishingĀ StormĀ as possible; and again, if Martin had wanted the Ironborn stuff to all be read before the rest of the story, since thatās when it technically takes place, heād have done so.
So I ended up making my own version instead. Itās basically just Orionisās list, with chapters reordered 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. (I also added the real names and character-chapter numbers to many ofĀ Danceās shifting-name chapters, which Orionis hadnāt done.) This seemed to fit my five criteria better than any of the other options:
It hasĀ roughĀ chronology, so you pick up with most every character across the board at roughly the same time afterStormĀ left off and keep going with all of them until they each run out of chapters.
It doesnāt haveĀ strictĀ chronology, so youāre not radically re-ordering the chapters despite what Martin felt was the best reading order when assembling the books originally.
It keeps the chapters in order rather than monkeying around to preserve reveals Iām already aware of.
Itās clearly labeled andĀ very easy to read, understand, and even alter, if you want.
Iāve explained my methodology to an almost embarrassingly comprehensive degree, soĀ you can understand what the heck I did here.
To be clear, I have no especial expertise in the events of each chapter, or whether the order I just assembled will present events in an intelligible, pleasing way. It seems like itĀ oughtĀ to, though. And Iām happy to crowdsource the refinement of it ā if you look this over and think a change would make it better, please let me know.
I start tonight. Looking forward to it!
UPDATE 01: Per commenter Charles R, my original version had āThe Watcher,ā which takes place after āThe Princess in the Tower,ā come before it in the reading order. Iāve therefore moved āCersei IXā and āThe Princess in the Towerā in between āJaime VIā and āThe Prince of Winterfell,ā preserving both chronology and chapter order. Thanks, Charles!
UPDATE 02: Upon further reflection and an edit by Charles R to his proposed solution, I moved āBran III,ā āJon VII,ā and āDaenerys VIā to fit in between āThe Princess in the Towerā and āThe Prince of Winterfell,ā to give āPrincessā and āThe Watcherā a little more distance between them.
UPDATE 03.1:Ā Iāve moved Davos III to after Cersei IV, since thatās the Cersei chapter in which she calls for the execution that Lord Manderly orders in that Davos chapter. This is the one bonafide āfixā Iāve made in this update, and it comes courtesy ofĀ Atanvarno, whoās created a revised reading order of his ownĀ (reading order; explanation) that you should check out, especially if youād like to preserve the Quentyn/Dorne reveal, which heās attempted to do with the absolute minimum of damage to chapter chronology. Heās made many other helpful suggestions, most of them tweaks for effect, some of which Iāve incorporated as detailed below.
UPDATE 03.2:Ā Atanvarno pointed out that starting Tyrionās storyline immediately after Cerseiās provides a fun contrast: Cerseiās paranoid that Tyrion will leap out of the walls of the Red Keep and kill someone else any moment when in fact heās busy drinking his way across the Narrow Sea. So I moved Tyrion I to directly after Cersei I.
UPDATE 03.3:Ā But this got me to thinking about the identical openings for the Cersei, Daenerys, and Jon storylines ā rulers awoken from dreams. I canāt put them all in a row since I wouldnāt want to either put Tyrion I before Cersei I or run the first few chapters of Dance out of order. But I can alternate ārulerā chapters with āquesterā chapters, so thatās what Iāve done: Cersei I/Tyrion I/Daenerys I/Brienne I/Jon I/Bran I. I think thatās a nice rhythm, and it enhances our sense that Feast and Dance really are two halves of the same giant story, with lots of intriguing and rewarding parallels, which was basically the whole point of this exercise. (Itād be nice if Brienne & Danyās stories were related the way Tyrion & Cersei and Jon & Bran are, but what can you do.)
UPDATE 03.4:Ā Commenter Nora pointed out that my original list had Victarion I and Reek II in jarringly close proximity; a lot takes place among the Ironborn between those two chapters, and itād be nice to give them more room to breathe. So I moved Alayne I (Sansa II) and Cersei V directly after Arya II to pad out that distance. This has a secondary beneficial effect: keeping Alayne and Aryaās chapters together reinforces the narrative parallel as they begin their ātrainingā under assumed identities. (Atanvarno suggested this move independently for that reason.)
UPDATE 03.5: Finally, Atanvarno pointed out that I had only one chapter, Samwell V, between Jaime VII and Jaime VIII. I movedĀ The Blind Girl (Arya IV),Ā A Ghost in Winterfell (Theon VI):, andĀ Tyrion X after Samwell V to spread the two Jaimes out a bit.
UPDATE 04:Ā In further correspondence with Atanvarno, he noted that while his suggested reading order bounces back and forth from Feast to DanceĀ and back on close to a chapter by chapter basis, mine tends to alternate between big multi-chapter chunks of each book. Was there a rationale behind this, he wondered? Not really. As I said up top, I basically just took Orionisās list and smoothed out the out-of-order chapters with minimal effort, then incorporated all the other tweaks Iāve listed. Those tweaks aside, that technique, not some sort of reasoned approach to the material, led to the chapter arrangement you see above. That said, Iām now kinda fond of the way I did it. In my second criterion, I said āI want something that preserves Martinās original flow as much as possible,ā and thatās a lot easier to do when youāre running a bunch of chapters from each book in a row rather than constantly switching between them. Both approaches have aspects to recommend them, mind you ā I think alternating the way Atanvarno suggests will keep readers from getting āstuckā in Feast material theyāre more familiar with and therefore might find a bit stale compared to the newer Dance material, for example ā but now that itās been pointed out to me, I stand by the way I (accidentally) did it.
UPDATE 05:Ā Iāve started seeing readers steer friends whoāve never readĀ FeastĀ orĀ Dance before to this post, and I started feeling bad that I didnāt have an option to preserve the Dorne reveal available to them. So I whipped one up, based once again on Atanvarnoās suggestion for how to rearrange the Dorne chapters to keep Quentynās secret until Doran reveals it to Arianne. The full variant reading order chapter list is hereĀ along with an explanation tailored to noobs, but the long and short of it is that you take The Princess in the Tower/Arianne II (#75) and The Merchantās Man/Quentyn I (#12) and put them after Alayne I/Sansa II (#44): Alayne I/The Princess in the Tower/The Merchantās Man. Everything else should be able to stay as-is. Obviously you donāt have to be a newbie to use this version; veterans who simply want to maintain that feeling of surprise in order to be true to Martinās intent or for their own enjoyment, this oneās for you too.
UPDATE 06:Ā I actually feel kinda bad messing with this at this point, now that itās been so widely reblogged and linked to and jpg-ified and all that, but Iāve recently come across a couple of minor changes that I think might well lead to an improved reading experience. The first comes from reader Pedro Miranda, who suggests putting Ā Jon II prior to Samwell I in order to preserve the Gilly/baby reveal, or more accurately to delay the spoiler somewhat. (It takes Sam another chapter to find out.) It did bother me a bit, while re-reading, that that reveal was spoiled, but since the truth of the matter is established so quickly within Samās storyline (and since itās not a huge deal compared to the Dorne situation) I just kind of let it slide. But unless anyone has a reason why the two chapters canāt be swapped so that you at least spend a full chapter with Sam and Gilly under the pretense that she has her own baby, I might as well do it.
UPDATE 07: Meanwhile, frequent commenter AHorwitt suggest putting Jaime II before Tyrion V, so that Jaimeās relative non sequitur about Criston Cole, the āKingmakerā who initiated the Dance of the Dragons, can segue directly into the chapter in which Tyrion reveals heās learned the secret identity of Aegon, setting up a potential Kingmaker role of his own. Again, unless anyone can come up with a reason not to do this, Iām all for making this minor switch in order to enhance the flow. Heck, it even sets up a transition directly from Tyrion still being quite alive to Cersei receiving the latest shipment of severed dwarf heads, so itās doubly useful.
UPDATE 08: Because Iām an idiot and wasnāt paying attention to what was going on in the actual chapters involved, I misread the suggestion that inspired Update 06, which actually called for the Gilly reveal to be MORE spoiled, not LESS. I donāt like that idea, so Iāve undone the swap and restored the original reading order of those two Jon and Sam chapters.
