Hello all. NBGA and Errent I very much appreciate your responses. And there was no offense taken by anything
I guess it just boils down to personal taste. (I cannot tell you how I taste - you'll just have to take a bite....ewwwww)
For me, Martin's unexpectedness of everything comes across as either immature or panicky. Either way, again in my own humble opinion, I find it detracts from the experience of immersing myself in the world.
This is of course something that varies from individual to individual - my reading style is that I cannot read more than one book at a time. (Also the same for listening to music - I tend to latch on to something I like and immerse myself in it for a while then I don't listen to it for months). So, for me, when something interferes with my ability to completely lose myself in a world, I get frustrated and distracted with the eventual end that I do not end up reading the rest of the book.
It's writers like Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Ray Bradbury whose worlds I use as yarsticks by which I measure other writers' worlds. These are the writers who shaped my understanding of fantasy (along with Tolkien and CS Lewis but that was from childhood where I was much less discerning).
I like the young Stark boy who ran into the forest as a warg. I was deeply hurt when Ed Stark was beheaded. I truly cared about the world in the first two novels. The third just did not measure up to the yardstick in my mind and I got lost....
And then the next installment of WoT came out (at the time it was Crossroads of Twilight) and there was no reason for me to continue slogging through the Martin book.
Anywho - thank you for the respectful and thoughtful responses - it is greatly appreciated