I just finished book 5 of the Game of Thrones: A Dance with Dragons. Before I started reading the series at the beginning of the pandemic, I watched the entire HBO series. Although the series runs eight seasons and 73 episodes, the more I read, the more the video series seemed schematic. So many details that did not or could not make it into the vast video production.
Of course, a video adaptation is simply a different artistic work than a book. The trajectory of the difference is predictable. If the novel and the video series were main branches of a tree, the longer they grow, the farther apart they get. That was how it felt to read the books after seeing the video series.
Season 1 and Book 1 are very similar. Book 2 and Season 2 started to diverge. By then of Book 5, I felt I was in a different story, or a version of a different story. At the end of Book 5, every major character was dead, near death, threatened with death, or just miserable.
Nothing that happened in the last two seasons of HBO series seemed to be the likely path of the characters at the end of Book 5.
George R.R. Martin said Book six will be published in November of 2023. I am so looking forward to it. I want to see what the story is like after 11 years of hiatus. Martin has to be influenced by what the HBO crew finally produced, so we will never know what Book 6 would have been without the HBO series.
I loved the books. The further I went through the books, the more I loved them.
First 36 books of 2022:
Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz
Essential Elements by Matt Tweed
Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud
The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Cochrane by David Cordingly
QED by Richard Feynman
Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis
Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis
The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer
The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut
The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss.
Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins
Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
First Principles by Thomas Ricks
Political Tribes by Amy Chua
Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson
1776 by David McCullough
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen
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