For those who have read the books, how close (or loose..) are the tv series compared to the books atm?.

Pretty close on overall arc. The books have a ton of sub plots.

I'm really mad that Hollywood is allergic to ugly. It really wouldn't kill them to cast people that aren't good-looking, especially in roles where BEING UGLY IS IMPORTANT TO THEIR CHARACTER. They can't even do plainness anymore, much less ugliness.

The order in which things are told differ (the book is not chronological at all). Some secondary characters (tertiary?) are not in the show, and their actions are credited to somebody else or just not told.
Bottom line, as theslitherydee said, the "greater design" is the same, sometimes it is identical down to the punctuation in the dialogues of the books.

From my experiences, watching this TV show, there are plenty of ugly characters in Game Of Thrones. That is one of the reasons why I like, this show. This show paints a very realistic picture.

I tend to say Blade Runner

Actually I liked the second season of the show better than the second book. The second book, in my opinon, had many passages, that were faaaaar tooooo looong. For the show, they removed exactly the right parts, and in the end, everything important was still there.

Ah!!! Yeah, yeah, The Shining!!! The others I didn't read them, in fact I just noticed that Jaws was based in a book :P
But its quite different isn't it?
Mmm this is a thing I must experience by myself.

Yes, but Blade Runner is better than Does Androids dream of electronic sheep (or at least I think so). the short story is good, but the film is better.

Oh god, that would be a debacle of the highest order. They have to wait for Martin to die, his estate to commission Eric Lustbader to write the last "two" books, then use those as screenplays for a 6-part movie franchise, and then they can adapt those into the 6th/7th seasons.

lol xD

If they indeed catch up to the books - and currently it seems, that it will happen - they could at least win one year by doing a "prequel"-season and show us the reign and downfall of the Mad King (hopefully played by Jack Nicholson ;-) )

They could always do a season based on the two Dunk and Egg stories, which were set 100 years before the current series.

My two cents; I don't like the tv series. Everytime the main tv writers add new dialog or scenes, they make the characters unlikable jerks. The books did a better job about making character at least somewhat likable. I feel like the HBO writers watched the second season of Rome and wished they could do that, but even darker and more extreme.