I literally read your post, opened the book and read that page. GOOD FUCKING SHIT. That was pretty amazing.
You read a lot of pages tonight, eh? Edit nvm our books must be different, with both epilogues my book is only 910 pages.
I’m a little different in that I don’t mind do a little “theatre of the mind” stuff, as long as it’s in limited amounts. I’m usually pretty good at setting up some epic landscapes in my head, even if they may be way off from the author’s idea
Liosan are bitches too. To recap my feelings: Andii are bitches Fuck the Forkrul Can’t say I’m a huge fan of the majority of Imass but there’s a couple I can root for Jaghut, Trell, Toblakai, Barghast, Edur and GreyFrog are ok with me. I feel like a need a novella about the moranth tbqh
Also I love this little glimpse into the Liosan thinking that while it’s possible that a human could be a great commander it’s likely they’d never see one Oh boy you have no idea what you’re in for
About 50% through. There’s always at least 1 plot thread that seems completely and wholly isolated from all the other stories going on and I always wonder how it will tie in. Gruntle/Trakeand Kilava/soletaken warren is this book’s thread that I say “what in the fuck I going on here and why should I care about this?” Eventually, it always does tie in, but man it’s a struggle at times.
Couldn’t sleep last night so I made it to chapter 18. This is by far the most ominous, darkest, depressing book in the series so far. Blegh.
On vacation now so was settling in last night to pound out a couple of chapters once the kids fell asleep, read 5 pages to get to chapter 19 then fell asleep lol
93% complete. This book is very good. Chapter 23 was fucking oustanding with all the Spire shit. I’m overall pretty satisfied how he’s wrapping shit up but can’t really say much as Spoiler: Huge spoiler don’t read Irush Tavore and the regulars are just about to face the 2 Pure Forkrul Assail army and the other Malazan/marine group is still mid-fight vs their Forkrul army (Kalam/Quick in bound among other entities) and they just revived the Cripple god but he’s still chained. 1 modest sized beef I have that I have to rant here: did Gesler really just sacrifice himself for a fucking dog, and it’s not even his dog, he’s barely had more than a handful of scenes interacting with the dog in all 10 books. Like, I understand the sentimental string he’s trying to tug, but fuck me man, we just got done with Stormy sacrificing himself to save Gesler and the Heart and then that’s how Gesler chooses to go out? Fucking dumb. I have a couple of big issues i’ll rant about when I finish and wrap my thoughts, but overall very satisfied so far.
When you have a chance, please give us a few spoilered thoughts, and more importantly, your final top 5-10 characters in order. Ending is about as good as you’re going to get for an series this epic
Unspoilered, couple of thoughts before I dive into more of it and decompress 10 books. I think GRRM needs to take notes: Erikson wraps up major plot points, ties the emotional loose ends together, leaves enough interesting things out there unrelated to main plot line yet to be delved into ie. Spoiler Karsa and Icarium, among others , and doesn’t have to murder every single character, just enough to make the ending have payoff
Thoughts (Forgive me, typed on my phone) Spoiler as I look back on this series, this will undoubtedly be the longest and most complicated book series I will ever read. When people have asked me what I’m reading and I tell them about it, I often describe it as running 10 marathons, not knowing the race route, so just jogging blindly, following the group. Aspects of the series have always puzzled me. Is he intentionally be difficult to follow to add mystery, or is he just really bad at getting you to understand things at times? I often times would have to reread pages at a time because I didn’t know who the POV was, assuming I had missed who it was in an earlier paragraph only to find it wasn’t clear, by literally any way possible, who the POV was until pages later. If used rarely for specific purposes, like building suspense, I think it would be ok; however it was often used for seemingly no good reason in retrospect other than to keep me on my toes. He’d waste 5 pages on a new character POV just to have them take an axe to the head without any payoff. He once introduced us to a seemingly awesome new T’lan Imass in the mines, found with his legs broken by Harllo, only for Erikson to LITERALLY FORGET HE EVEN WROTE THE CHARACTER, according to the Wikipedia, when a fan asked him what happened to the character after book 10. And those are just specific examples, but there are 10s of more frustrating decisions. Why do I bring this all up? Because there is no fucking reason why each book needed to be 1200 pages long. None. We didn’t need, in retrospect, to know literally anything about over 20 characters, and over the course of ~12,000 pages I probably read 50 pages about a random marine, that didn’t end up mattering. He’d go off on all these side plots (I mentioned my beef with Gruntle earlier) that didn’t end up mattering at all. As much as I loved the Crokus/Cutter and Apsalar/Sorry ending, it didn’t mean quite as much because we literally didn’t see her for 4-5 books. The juice wasn’t quite as tasty from the squeeze as it should have been, even when we got the story we wanted, all because THE BOOKS CONTAIN LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF PAGES OF SHIT. This has always been my beef with the series. When he gets plots together and converges them, it rivals the Sanderson-avalanche at peak moments in those books, however there’s so much shit to wade through and unnecessary confusion that is either just occasionally poorly written/edited or intentionally there just to make the most complicated and difficult books I’ve ever read EVEN MORE UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED FOR THE SAKE OF BEING CONFUSING AND COMPLICATED. For example, at the end of Book 10, it’s either Kalam or Quick who makes some comment about the goddess Burn. It’s literally been 10 books and we still don’t know anything about this or anything about her role in everything and it turns out, according to the wiki, that Olar Ethil isn’t even Burn even though she tells us she is. Also, wtf was even the point of the ENTIRE OLAR ETHIL AND torrance THREAD IF THATS HOW YOU END IT. I mean, I could really go on and on about this, because there’s so much of it. Why? BECAUSE EACH BOOK IS 1200 PAGES LONG AND HAS 600 CHARACTERS WHO MAY OR MAY NOT BE ELDER GODS or peasants who die 1 page after being introduced. But, it’s an amazingly creative and expansive world building project, some outstanding characters and character development, some amazing pieces of writing drama and humor often intermixed, some really remarkable and memorable characters, and some really well done plot threads that were so captivating and WORTHWHILE that I don’t regret reading the entire thing and will 100% eventually reread it, knowing now what I can freely skip on second pass through. As an amateur author myself it’s such an overwhelming and awe inspiring work of high fantasy that will likely only be matched for me In scope once Sanderson’s 10 Book stormlight archive saga is done. There is so much that could have been executed cleaner, better, MORE EFFICIENT that I subtracted points in my ratings from every book, but it surpassed my expectations and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Now I’m gonna read some dumb, mindless westerns for awhile to cleanse my brain and keep working on my novels that will never be published.
Book 1 I started in early 2017. Ratings 1. Gardens 8.0 2. Deadhouse 8.5 3. Memories of Ice 8.0 4. House of Chains 8.0 5. Tides 8.5 6. Bonehunters 8.5 7. Reaper’s Gale 9.0 8. Toll the Hounds 9.5 9. Dust of Dreams 7.0 10. Crippled God 9.0 Character Rankings - not final 1. Fiddler - the protagonist 2. Karsa 3. Tehol 4. Trull Sengar 5. Kruppe 6. Bottle 7. Crokus 8. Grey Frog 9. Ublala Pung 10. Iskaral Pust 1603. Nimander 1604. Clip 1605 and 1606. Telorast and the other little skeleton dragon I couldn’t give a shit about.
Grey Frog is amazing. Pung may be overrated on my list, and I’m probably biased because he’s been the main comic relief for the past 2 books. Shadowthrone’s creepy “tee hee” laugh disqualifies him.