How are the witcher books? (have all the games but yet to barely touch them).
Worth a read?

Most definitely. I'm not counting myself as an avid reader and I can count the books I read in past two years on my ten fingers however I was not able to put the Witcher books out of my bedside table.
If you will read the books first, I'm sure you'll appreciate the games more because there are A LOT of references.

Best books ever. I'm honestly not saying this lightly. I read a lot (50-70 per year), and if I were to pick my favourite book of all time it would be the Witcher series. I read it the first time around 2001 and have re-read it 5 times since.

That said, I read them in Polish so can't vouch for the translation. But from what I heard they were good too.

Also, by now everyone trying the books for the first time has at least heard of, if not played and completed, the Witcher game. So that feeling of "wow this is some cool new stuff" might be gone.

Got the first book (translated in French) in a secondhand bookstore. It was more of a kind of character introduction with some small stories (side missions in games) and an unresolved plot with Yennefer (or Triss, I don't remember). It was OK for a fantasy novel(the kind you read in public transport).

I have only read the first 2 (the short story collections), but I liked them. I still have the rest of the books on my to-read-pile and I hope to get around to them soon.

Everyone I know who has read them says that the actual series is a lot better than the short stories, so I obviously have a lot to look forward to.

It would be cool if CDPR would put the first chapter or prologue of the first book as an extra goodie in the Witcher games (I know the first one comes with a short story but its not the same)

They are......... bewitching.
YEEEEAAAAAHH!!!!!

Actually it kinda is the same.^^

The very first Witcher book is a collection of short stories, so the first chapter is also a short story. I don't know if it's the same one that came with the first game though.

English translation is very poor unfortunately.

Maybe it's my experience talking with non native speakers, but I found the translation of the first book very good, considering.

I found the humor to be awesome, though some may not pick up on it. I was literally laughing out loud at several points throughout the first collection (first book). Definitely worth a try, and if you like his writing style, the rest of the books are good, as well, I'm told. Have only read the first one so far.

Very good books, especially the first two short stories collections. It's not exactly a materpiece of literature on par with, for example, Tolkien and Le Guin's works, but it's damn good, intelligent entertainment.

The Witcher books are ok. Maybe the translations were off, but they weren't that fantastic to me. I just finished reading them and I'm surprised they were able to pull the game series out following that ending, with the same characters. Some of the dialogues in the games are lifted word for word from the books (Zoltan's philosophical diatribe with Geralt in Vizima, for one, and there are a few others) and it seems a crime that as central as Ciri is to Geralt's life that she doesn't even get a mention, but rather a much less important analogue in the first game (Alvin). And Yennefer barely gets a mention at all too, which is baffling.

The Witcher 3 could have started like TW 1 and skipped over the events in TW 1 and 2 in a brief text splash, and the game would be the perfect first sequel to the books. But that's not what heppened and instead it's like they took out the parts they didn't like at first... Ciri was the main character of half the books, and yet was completely ignored in the first game.

I picked up The Last Wish in a bookshop and read a line at random.

'The monster suddenly gasped and tilted his monstrous head.'

Witcher books are great but, as a foreigner, you will probably miss some subtleties that stem from polish language/culture...Still I would try it :-P