Thing is, for the first three books, it was jam-packed with plot. Maybe a bit less so in the third; I don't remember it well enough to be sure. But I remember that when I first picked it up, I described it as being "so full of plot it would make Robert Jordan cry."

. . . unfortunately, that hasn't lasted. And Martin is part of the dataset that fed into my thoughts on writing long series (http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/580795.html), because I see him making several of the same mistakes Jordan did.