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SqueezeAndRun

So You Want To Read The Witcher Books? (Guide)

Books

TL;DR: The books are really good and can really enhance your understanding and appreciation of everything that's happening in the games. Click the links to buy/download them.

Intro:

So chances are that if you’re here, you’re a fan of the Witcher, but with the giant influx of popularity that occoured upon the release of the Witcher III: Wild Hunt, many new fans are unaware of the source material that inspired these fantastic games.

The Witcher video games are based on a renowned fantasy book series by the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The Witcher Series is made up of 2 short story collections and 5 novels. The short story collections introduce many of our favorite characters and do a lot of world building, and the novels tell the story of Geralt and Ciri. These books take place several years before the beginning of the first game and provide a lot of background information on the characters and world. They do not spoil the story of the games in any way.

Sorted in chronological order (the way you should read them) the books that make up the series are: The Last Wish (short story collection), Sword of Destiny (short story collection), Blood of Elves (beginning of novels), Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, The Swallow’s Tower, Lady of the Lake. The first five books have official English translations and the last two (The Swallow’s Tower and Lady of the Lake) have very good fan translations available. Official translations of both are expected sometime in the next two years.

Why Should I Read Them?

  • You'll finally understand all the references Geralt and other characters are constantly making to past events

  • They'll provide you with a lot of in depth background information on the world and characters

  • You'll actually understand who the hell everyone is

  • Random names of places like Kovir, Nilfgaard, Cintra, Kaedwen, etc. will actually mean something to you

  • You'll care about the characters and story significantly more

  • They're just damn good books

Where Can I Get Them?

^(Prices as of 10/28/15)

The Last Wish:

Sword of Destiny:

Blood of Elves:

Time of Contempt:

Baptism of Fire:

The Swallow’s Tower:

Lady of the Lake:

A Note About The Fan Translations

These are my personal editions of the fan translations. I took the most recent and revised versions of the fan translations I could find and completely reformatted them using a retail version of the Time of Contempt eBook as a template. I made a few minor edits in regards to capitalization and using double quotation marks instead of single ones for speech. I put some serious work into making these look nice (probably 10+ hours total). They still contain some minor grammatical errors and typos here and there, but that is to be expected from a community project like this, and it doesn't detract from the overall reading experience too much. My versions of these books provide the best reading experience as far as I know.

Major Features:

Extras (by me):

Hope this can help y'all to love the Witcher as much as I do! Enjoy!

Posted Oct 28, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC · edited

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