Jimmy, the last 1/3 of A Dance With Dragons is excellent. A lot of that book is chess pieces moving around and some characters being kept in holding patterns, but the latter end of that book is when things intensify.
Generally, I agree with popular opinion that A Storm of Swords is the best book in the series. Second best is A Game of Thrones, third best is A Clash of Kings, fourth best is A Dance with Dragons, and A Feast for Crows (while quite good) is the worst of the bunch. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who rather liked Feast.
EDIT: As of yesterday (8/16/2017), I finished reading Fellowship of the Ring (the first 1/3 of the LOTR trilogy.) Good book, but somewhat exhausting to read. I may read another book before moving on to The Two Towers. That book may be Blackmark by Jean Lowe Carlson. It was a freebie on my Kindle, so hopefully it will be good. If it entices me to invest in the series, great. If not, then nothing lost. I sure as gravity won't turn down a free book in my preferred literary genre.
Man, my backlog of books is getting up there. I still have the remaining books in L. Frank Baum's Oz collection to read (I've only read the first one, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), I want to restart Ashok Banker's Ramayana...
EDIT 2: As of today (8/21/2017), I decided to just continue the Lord of the Rings trilogy with The Two Towers. I thought I could intersperse Blackmark in there, but I want to keep going with Frodo, Aragorn, and company.