Finished Dragons last week...for the most part, I liked it the beginning was a little slow but the end made up for it. Way better than Crows...I can see how these are really books 4a and 4b but I could see that they could have been together with some really heavy editing.
The count starts now for Winter...I'll guess 4 years from now
I just finished
A Feast for Crows, and now I'm a few chapters into
A Dance with Dragons. And I agree: it's like volume 4-A & volume 4-B. As I read my way through
A Feast for Crows I was left wondering what the hell had happened to a number of characters after the end of
A Storm of Swords. And it became very clear that
A Feast for Crows had a somewhat more narrow focus on a number of storylines, most notably around the Lannisters.
It leaves me wondering: how will HBO handle this for the show? After all, it seems as though the events of book 4 & 5 are happening concurrently. I can't imagine that they would want to see an entire cast of characters just disappear (Jon, Dany, Tyrion, Stannis, etc) while the adaptation of book 4 focuses on the Lannisters, Brienne, Sam, Sansa, Arya & the Iron Men. But the prospect of combining the two books for one big MEGA-SEASON just seems difficult to comprehend.