The book read as a 3rd party retrospective of the events and it felt a bit like doing a paper on the history of the Targaryans. For me that was long, tedious and lacking any tension.
I also couldn’t help noticing that GRR Martin seemed to latch onto certain words and use them again and again. For example, the use of “calumny” seemed to show up so many times, I wondered if a thesaurus might not have come in handy.