Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pants" data-source="post: 3088145" data-attributes="member: 8849">I think they're kind of overrated, Deadhouse Gates in particular which everyone seems to laud as the 'greatest thing ever,' but they're certainly worth trying out. During my initial reading of the series, I blazed through Gardens of the Moon and even though it was a big mess of a book, it was fairly short, exciting, and it dropped enough hints about how sprawling the world was that I found it fairly easy to get through. 'Ware the ending, which is just the worst ending that could ever be written, but the rest is enjoyable.Unfortunately, after Gardens, the rest of the Malazan books become waaaay too bloated. Deadhouse Gates, at least, remains fairly well-paced despite its immense length (not counting its other flaws). Too bad half of the plot threads feel extremely extraneous and completely useless, while taking up a lot of screen time.Memories of Ice almost succumbs to the Jordan mentality of immensely useless bloat. Despite it being a really good and exciting read, it's just... way too fraught with needless prose, plot switchbacks that screw with continuity too much, and an excessive amount of overly dramatic scenes that are so dramatic that they lose any impact they might have had. I once joked about Erikson relying on his drama club so that he could beat readers over the heads about how dramatic his books are. Still, despite all those problems, I loved the book. Great battle scenes, a real sense of history to the world, memorable characters, and enough 'what the hell just happened' moments to keep me riveted.I won't give a detailed analysis of the other books I've read, but they're mostly positive. Seriously, give Erikson a try. He's certainly not for everyone. If you don't care for an abundance of magic, being utterly confused half the time, and reading about sprawling battles that probably would've depopulated half of Europe, then hey he's probably not for you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification