Album Rating: 4.5

Midnight Tides is great of course. And yeah I love Toll as well, lots cite it as a weak point but it’s the probably most unique and certainly the most thematically resonant book and in the series. And yeah that ending makes up for it.

that's very true. I actually didn't really come to appreciate the entirety of Toll the Hounds until after I finished the series.

but yeah MoI is killer definitely top 3 for me. probably the most fun book all around.

3 is a good stopping point but idk i couldn't put the series down and it's so dense that if i stopped i'd probably forget half of it

Album Rating: 4.5

What can be tough with the Malazan books is that Erikson makes things intentionally obscure so as to make the world seem more real - so whenever you read about something that supposedly happened in the (distant) past, take it with a grain of salt, because it probably didn’t happen exactly how the character remembers it or how it’s been recorded in the histories (this gets even worse in Toll the Hounds where the narrator himself is unreliable).

I'd be very careful using the wiki. even if you're being careful a lot of spoilers have slipped through the cracks.

if you're confused about stuff (and you should be) there's a re-read that TOR did which breaks down each chapter scene by scene. it also has reactions from both a new reader and someone re-reading the series. helps a lot with understanding the complexity (which will ramp up significantly over the next few books). the series is really dense. was pretty much essential for me when I read it. only advice here is to skip Bill's thoughts because he can be a little spoiler-y. I'd just read Amanda's thoughts and the chapter breakdowns.

that's fair. I stopped using it as much a few books in and only really went back to reference. you get better at understanding his style the more you read. GotM is probably the hardest to understand because it's so new and the writing is weaker

damn I really wanna start a re-read now

Album Rating: 5.0

ive developed a weird love hate relationship with the series mainly because of the obnoxious fanbase that won't admit to any of these absurdly massive flaws in it but even through all that it's still a very special series to me

Album Rating: 4.0

yeah it definitely has its flaws, but taken as a whole it's easily one of the best fantasy series i've ever read. like for every annoyingly dragged out plotline, grating philosophical diatribe, and copy-pasted "gritty foulmouthed military grunt" character, there's still moments or scenes in those books that just can't be rivaled by anything else in fantasy in terms of scale or emotional gutpunch.



also agreed, MoI is the best one (Itkovian's resolution is one of my favorite scenes in literature ever). probably followed by Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale, and then The Crippled God.

Album Rating: 4.0

sidenote, Reaper's Gale was the only time I've ever actually had a violent physical reaction to a scene in a book

fuck the fucking errant

it has a lot of flaws for sure but yeah as a whole it's the best fantasy series i've ever read as well. haven't read anything that comes close.

what's worse is it kinda killed other fantasy for me. nothing i've read - including The Black Company which Erikson was influenced heavily by - scratches the same itch.

Album Rating: 5.0

it sucks that there's such a massive stretch of material that's just a complete slog to get through, toll the hounds through dust of dreams was so hard to push through, even the first half of the crippled god I remember being slow, but even in that odd 2500 pages there were still those really bright, emotive moments that make it worth it

Album Rating: 4.5

Those staff double post benefits :3

Album Rating: 5.0

if you think it would ruin things for you then sure, personally i never had any problem like that. The black company is good, you can certainly feel its age and it might catch you off guard how small scale and straightforward it is compared to modern high fantasy but it's quite good. The Wheel of Time I haven't gotten into yet but ive only read a little bit of the first book and it felt very dated and generic to me. Obviously gonna give a proper try at some point but that was initial impression.

yeah there's some serious slog towards the end of the series. it's very much a flawed masterpiece of a series in my eyes. but you could probably levy similar criticism at most epic fantasy to be fair. it's such a long-winded genre.

"as to not render everything unreadable."

probably not a bad idea, but you may not be as in love with the series as I and others are. I'd imagine The Wheel of Time would be hard to read after Malazan from what I've heard. it's very trope-y. The Black Company has a lot of the same dark humor and military characters as Malazan so you might actually enjoy it. it just doesn't have the same scope as Malazan.

but yeah there is quite literally nothing else out there like it, both the good and bad. take that as you will.

Album Rating: 5.0

the only thing malazan and black company have in common is the emphasis on common soldiers as characters and their relationships, there's a lot of influence from how modern soldiers are depicted as well, their manner and slang and such. otherwise there's not really any similarity.

I should really finish it. even though it's basically Malazan Soldiers: The Series (well, TBC came first but I digress) I never found the plot engaging enough to finish the whole thing. I've heard it gets a lot more interesting later on though? is that true?

Album Rating: 5.0

yeah TBC picks up the further in you get



a tv series for it sounds hype af, id def watch that

book 3 rules hard

might actually start a re-read of the series once i finish Oathbringer. Sanderson has great plotting but can't hold a torch to Erikson's characters and i'm missing them hard

new album when

Album Rating: 4.0

don't listen to the Wheel of Time haters, it definitely has its down periods (books 8-10 in particular are a slog, and the first couple books, while good, are definitely a bit tropey), but overall reading that series is one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. fleshed out characters and mindblowing scenes all over the place, and the length of the series makes all the big payoff moments that much more satisfying.



also, I honestly think it plays the whole "farmboy-to-chosen-one" trope in a really unique way.