As a long-time book reader, that's pretty much how I feel about the show. I'm absolutely thrilled that it exists, so that the wonderful story and characters can reach a wider audience, but it'll never have the same depth and detail that the books do.
At one time I planned to read the books when the series had ended. But I've seen too many people, who while liking the books, have complained about the latter books containing way too much filler and padding. And there have been plenty of comments regarding the Tolkien level of detail (and that's not a compliment) regarding clothing and tables of food. It took me years to get through Fellowship Of The Ring because at one point during an early trip through the woods, it felt like Tolkien was describing every single tree.
These folks have complimented the show for cutting out a lot of useless fat and streamlining the story with better pacing.
I don't think so.
I love the fourth and fifth book and I found the fifth book in particular very exciting. There are always descriptions of food and clothes and armor, in every book, but they don't take up nearly as much space as people make it out - and anyway, you can just skip the food descriptions. But there's so much more in the books that has nothing to do with food or clothes.
Besides, it doesn't make sense to say "well, the show is better because books 4 and 5 are slow" when the show hasn't even gotten to the books 4 and 5 material. Even if books 4 and (to a lesser extent) 5 do not have great pacing, books 1-3 are fantastic and very exciting to read; book 3 in particular (which is being adapted into seasons 3 and 4) is a real page-turner and most people's favorite in the series, and is the climax of the first part of the story. Most of the reason why people were disappointed with books 4 and 5 is, IMO, due to the fact that they couldn't live up to book 3, that it took so long for them to be published, and that they're transition/setup books introducing new characters and locations and setting up the next chapter in the story.
And a lot of changes made in the show had nothing to do with "cutting out useless fat" or "better pacing"; for instance, the Theon/Ramsey/sack of Winterfell storyline is done 10 times better in the book, in the same amount of screentime, and they only changed it so they wouldn't need to cast Ramsey before season 3; they completely changed the character Robb marries and their relationship, and while I can see why they gave Robb a lot more screentime than he has in the books (where his marriage happens entirely off-page and is only retold by him to Catelyn in A Storm of Swords, since he is not a POV character), I really don't see why this change had to be made, especially since it only resulted in a boring, cliche romance that took up a lot of valuable screentime. Sansa's marriage is far more traumatic and cruel on the part of the Lannisters, and actually takes far
less screentime; in the book, we are focused on Sansa and her plight and character development, while in the show, everything is watered down to make Tyrion and Cersei look better, the wedding is stretched out into multiple episodes (whereas in the book it's sprung on her at the last moment and she's told by Cersei in no uncertain terms that she will be wedded and bedded the same afternoon/night), we get romcom-like scenes of Sansa discussing the merits of Tyrion as a bridegroom with Margaery and comic scenes with Loras (who is not a comic gay cliche in the books at all) and a bunch of other show-only scenes of people like Olenna, Tywin and Varys snarking at each other. Season 3 wasted too much screentime in King's Landibg where there wasn't much going on, and made it a far inferior storyline than it is in the book. On the other hand, you spend more time with Cat in book 3 and have a better buildup to the Red Wedding. Roose Bolton was also much more established as a character in the books before the Red Wedding. Book 2 and 3 have much better pacing than season 2 and 3.
That's just one of the examples of the show actually
adding a lot of useless fat to the story. For instance, the awful "WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS?" storyline of season 2 was utter filler that was added to the story just because they wanted to give Dany more screentime. Theon's torture scenes, which are not in the book - I can see why they did it, they are doing it all chronologically and need to show what he went through, but they didn't have to spend so much screentime on it. Then there's Ros and Podrick-the-sex-god and a bunch of other brothel scenes made for the show in order to feature some T&A. And countless useless scenes of people in King's Landing snarking at each other, which we learn nothing new from, but which seem to be the show's favorite way of filling up screentime.
On the other hand, the show has almost none of the backstory about the Seven Kingdoms or the past events like Robert's rebellion which are still affecting the characters (for instance, in the books, it's easy to guess who Jon Snow's mother is during the first book due to Ned's thoughts in his POV chapters, in the show you have no idea), you get far less in the way of the backstory of the characters and families, the prophecies and mysticism are downplayed, and foreshadowing is almost entirely missing.
The show also tends to focus on some characters (mostly, everyone who is in King's Landing at court, or characters who are funny or snarky or can do cool stuff with a sword or dragons) and push others to the background (Catelyn being a prime example). In the books, there are lots of scenes between Cat and her family since book one, but in the show, they delayed their appearances till season 3 (or they are already dead at that point, like her father). A lot of things get changed just because they don't want to introduce certain characters at a certain point because of the size of the cast (while that doesn't stop them from introducing original characters like the above mentioned Ros).
What the show only viewers are also missing are the internal thoughts and character development, especially of introverted characters like Sansa, Catelyn or Jon, but even of the more talkative ones (there's a lot that Tyrion feels and thinks about that he doesn't snark about). In the show, you would have no idea how Sansa feels about the Hound, for instance.
The dreadfort scenes do seem to have jumped ahead again so far as the books were concerned. I still don't like what they've done with Ramsay but they're handling Theon/Reek well and the sub-plot of having the Bolton men hunting down the surviving Stark boys is interesting. Curiously, I thought that Theon seemed to have the full set of fingers when shaving Ramsay (though the gloves seemed to be hiding missing ones earlier), yet he limped like he had missing toes.
Well, they don't need to use CGI for his toes, unless he goes barefoot. It would be a bit more difficult to pretend that he's missing fingers.
Oh I get that, but, for example, last week we saw 'Jamie's' stump. Which presumably was either a prosthetic arm or the stump of a real amputee for close-ups.
They could either do something similar with the hand of someone missing some digits (which wouldn't be that hard to find in Northern Ireland!) or, more easily, just edit the scene a little better so that we don't see an intact hand belonging to a character whose finger we saw getting chopped off last season. Fewer close-ups might have been in order.
I don't know how they're doing it in GoT, but I listened to an interview with a guy who played Chaff (the District 11 Victor) in Catching Fire the other day; his character is missing a hand (though you barely notice it in the film, since he's a minor character) - and he said that they just told him to hold his hand in a fist. It's apparently easy to film it in the way to make it look like someone is missing a hand. I imagine it would be far more difficult to hold your fingers in that way. Some CGI would probably be needed, and they weren't willing to use CGI for Tyrion's nose, either. True, Peter Dinklage's head gets far more screentime than Alfie Allen's hands, but still.
