Sorry to run against the stream chaps ... but on the strength of the comments here I got the books.
I'm currently wading my way through them, the ideas are great but for me something is missing from the series - I think its the fact that he's weaving so many concurrent threads that its hard to get attached to the characters involved.
The first book wasn't as bad because it was focused heavily around the Stark family, but by book three there must be around 12 seperate threads weaving and while this is clever and interesting and all ... it just makes things confusing for me.
Even Tolkein who loved to be intricate kept things to a relatively small group of characters and ensured that they kept together in reasonably large groups instead of heading off seperately (and worse still then meeting someone who 'turns' into another main character who then seperates from them).
As such the books are 'readable' enough and I'll undoubtably read them all (mainly because I've got this far so I want to see how it ends) and I do think it'd make a cool strategy computer game
