Veteran AF: Game of Thrones, Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Book 37 of 2022

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Game of Thrones, Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Book 37 of 2022

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