I would like to disagree about as passionately, and emphatically as one possibly could about both Martin's prose being nothing fancy (which I admit is subjective once you get past 'competent') and about losing nothing if you don't read the books. The changes have been subtle, but they're extreme enough where I'm now treating the book and the show as separate entities. The show is still good, but as Imrahil said, they've given the characters moral facelifts...this is a bad thing in my book, as the nastiness, the ambiguity, all of that wonderful self-serving ego were major draws for me. I've quite literally cringed when I've seen them pull punches.