I have never played the Witcher, and didn't get more than one or two episodes into the TV series, however I have finished game of thrones and wanted a fantasy series so I wanted to give it a shot. The first two books are short story collections, and the subsequent five books are normal novels. This was a short story collection. My main two gripes are that I found the writing style a little hard to follow at times, and also many of the characters are kind of written as archetypes. That being said I did really enjoy this overall, even though I have gripes I found the world and different stories a little bit addictive. I think the character of Geralt is enough of a through line between all the the different stories that it still feels coherant. I also enjoyed the fairy-tale aspect of many of the different stories. It also was nice to get straight into the action rather than having a slow exposition & getting started section which is very common in the fantasy genre.