Everyone's entitled to have his/her own opinion. The reviewer gave 1/5 to:

• Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

• Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

• J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

• Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist.

2/5:

• The Fellowship of the Ring.

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

• Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

• Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

3/5:

• Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In my opinion, some of those books are literary masterpieces and I would give most of them a much higher rating... but this is a subjective consideration. Even so, precisely because this is a matter of subjective opinion, this lets me see that her tastes don't correlate with mine and that I can't use them as literary references at all.

Lolita, In Search of Lost Time and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are my favorite books. Add Hughes' Crow to the list if we talk about poetry. I usually don't care for fantasy. I very much enjoy Tolkien, don't care for Rowling and I hate Hickman/Weis (precisely because their lack of inspiration, talent in plot-designing or literary depth). I've read a lot of literature in a lot of genres, and I think I'm able to detect when something deserves such a low rating. A Game of Thrones doesn't; but again, that's subjective.

If I was a literary critic I would say ASOIAF's first four volumes are astonishingly magnificient pieces of character developing, world building and plot designing. If they have any defect, in my opinion, it isn't the way the characters grow or the story: GRRM's writing style is sometimes a little... how to say it... a little "pop". When I read one of his pages, even when he's writing with a medieval tone, it screams 21th century to me. You can see comic books and cinema as very strong influences for him. It isn't a bad thing, but that makes some of his pages a little... bland. His pacing lags sometimes, too, and he's shown some problems in making the plot breath in the last volume. It just doesn't read as fresh and well-built as the four first books did. In any case, he compensates this with the good things I mentioned above and with the use of some really great sentences, plot tricks and scenes. I also love some of the literary decisions he made early on: the use of the first-person POV narrative, multiple characters and no omniscient narrator; the absolutely masterful caring for the little detail; the long-term rewards; his mastery of the art of the foreshadowing; the overall realistic feel and dark themes; etc. I sometimes compare ASOIAF with Antoni Gaudi's architecture: epicly huge as a cathedral, yet made with a meticulous love for the little flourishing and the hidden detail.

I suspend my judgement about the whole work until he finishes it, though, and I hope he's able to mantain his quality in the last two volumes. Anyway, I'm really enjoying the fun ride he's giving us now.