I'm like 200 pages in and have no edging clue what's going on. It supposed to be like this?

 

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I didn't care for it. I finished book one and quit about 1/2 through the second book. I don't care for his writing style. He adds way to many meaningless names and places that just confuse the reader and add nothing to the story.

 

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I'm 28% into the first book and all I know is some guy got killed by fire and another dude got knocked out while on patrol and a guy is investigating a massacre on a beach. Other than that I have no idea what's happening. He jumps from place to place and storyline to storyline and has no explanation of anything in between or during.

 

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I've found with most people who've attempted to read it, that they either hate it or love it.

It isn't an easy read, but if you can stick with it, when things tie together it's remarkable.

It can be tough though, some things take 5 books to tie in.


As for me, the first half of every book but one (House of Chains, mostly because their was a smaller cast of characters being focused on) was tough to get through, but enjoyed the second halves. I have to be in the right mindset to tackle Malazan.

 

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The first book is a lot harder than the other books in the series. It is more or less something that is universally accepted and the author has even commented that if he had it to do again the first book would not be as difficult as it is.

If you like it all stick with it and it will get better.

Of course, the last book in the series is the single most disappointing thing I have ever read. I can tell you with no hyperbole that I have never in my entire life disliked anything as much as I disliked book ten of that series. After reading nine massive book I put book 10 down after a month of excruciating drudgery at the 60% mark and will never touch it again. I still don't know how the series ends and that book was such a self indulgent piece of shit I honestly don't care.

Erikson took his love for writing pointless sections that do nothing but display a philosophical point and took it to the absolute extreme. Book 10 is literally 100% mind numbing character introspection. The plot grinds to a complete and utter halt as he jumps character to character having them wax philosophically about everything that has happened to them in the first nine books so that he can underline it with some revelation. He boiled the majority of the plot lines down to nothing and abandoned them just to get them out of the way and what we have left is literally unreadable drudgery. He literally wrote nine books so that he could con us in to reading his personal musings about life for 1000 pages. Self indulgent, back stabbing asshole.

Books 1-6 = best fantasy ever written
books 7-8 = worse but still good
book 9 = moderately awful
book 10 = The single worst pile of garbage ever committed to paper

Steven Erikson is dead to me and I will never read another word that man writes.

 

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Wow, I agree almost entirely with what Yoss wrote about the books, except I didn't bother to buy the book 10.

I never even finished book 9.

I forgot to mention that i put down The Bonehunters (book 6) about 6 months or so ago, about halfway through, and haven't looked at it since.

I did get NIght of Knives (another author writing about Malazan) for Christmas, so i'll give it a whirl to see if Esslemonts style is better suited to me.

 

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I have two of Esslemonts books in the Malazan universe.

I thought the first one "Night of Knives" was OK. Not great, annoying as hell is some areas, quite decent in others. The second one (something about crimson guards) was much better, but still wasn't great. I'll give another book in the series a chance some day.