I bounced pretty hard off the books. I very quickly said the Eight Deadly Words. I've never seen the show.
The Eight Deadly Words are "I don't care what happens to these people."
I'm in the exact same boat with Game of Thrones. I tried reading the first book, quickly forgot who everyone was, and even when I managed to remember I simply couldn't bring myself to give a stuff. It doesn't help that the author, in my opinion, cannot write novels very well - instead, his works read like extended screenplays, which might be one reason they've been translated so successfully to the screen.
Lately I've been reading the Leviathan trilogy, by Scott Westerfeld. It's also filled with some pretty awesome illustrations by Keith Thompson. I don't want to give too much of the story away, but it's basically a steampunk-ified alternate history of WWI, and starts off following the story of an Austrian prince named Aleksander. I'm on the second book now, Behemoth, and I just started reading it yesterday and am past halfway already...
I have fond memories of these books - half the delight was always seeing what diesel-powered or biological marvel he'd come up with next! If you like that, might I recommend the Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve? Another set of young adult books I have fond memories of, set millennia after an apocalyptic war. Mobile cities roam the earth and
eat each other, with the Tibetian Plateau being the last bastion of stationary civilization. The action initially follows an apprentice historian from London but heads to all four conrners of the globe by the end - well worth a read!
I love those books! It's been a while since I read them, but I really enjoyed them. (And the illustrations are awesome, I wish more books had drawings like that!)
Haha, true...but it would be hard to find a way to make actual physics apply to a flying whale, so a fair amount of science fantasy was bound to happen anyway.
My current read is A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab. It's the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic, which I highly recommend for anyone who likes their fantasy/alternate world novels on the dark-and-gritty side. I'm enjoying the second book so far, but I sort of wish I'd re-read the first one because I don't quite remember how it ended.
The artist has a site well worth checking out!And I've heard good things about A Darker Shade of Magic. Hopefully I'll be able to borrow it from a friend soon...