In all honesty finishing the books is going to be an order of magnitude more difficult than the show which ruthless cut back the extraneous story lines of the books.
But it's really obvious that without Martin's hand on the tiller, the show has really suffered in the most basic ways, plotting and story telling. They're lucky that this season sits atop 6 seasons of world and character building so that it mostly sticks together. However, it looks like only the most ardent/blind of fans are the ones sticking up for it. You know its bad when the most threadbare of arguments are being trotted out defending this season.
"You can't criticize a show for realism when it has dragons and zombies" is pretty much the worst argument. You can actually. The plotting, the characters decisions, what happens needs to be internally consistent. That's a basic of story telling. Previous versions of the show emphasized how distance was a key part of the story. The Wall was far away and therefore couldn't have been helped when the Wildlings attacked as one example. You can't use geography as a plot device in one season and then completely disregard it the next.
However, I'm less hung up on the timeline/geography stuff. Mine has more to do with just how the actual story doesn't make sense. How could Jamie have captured one of the great strongholds of Westeros in a day? Why didn't Olena see Cersei's attack coming? Why did Tyrion think it a good idea to attack Casterly Rock? Why does Jon Snow think it's a good idea to put his life in danger for the stupidest of plans to capture a wight when he's the King of the North and has to prepare his people for an existential battle? These are the things that bother me. It doesn't make any damn sense.
And yes, you can reverse engineer explanations for all these things. But the fact that you have to speaks to how spotty the storytelling is. You shouldn't need to do that. The plotting should unfold in a way that it all builds to the key moments.
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