This is actually the middle trilogy of a related ( same universe, concurrent timelines, co-occurring characters ) now quadruple-trilogy. It starts with the Farseer Trilogy, then the Liveship Traders, followed by the Tawny Man trilogy, most recently the Rain Wilds series. I haven’t read the last, but I prefer the first and third ( focused on the same main character ) to the Liveship books. The Rain Wilds books apparently are back in the Liveship storyline, for those who preferred that set.
They’re solid time killers. Not awesome, but solid.
Well, they’re certainly not to everyone’s tastes. Gardens of the Moon is actually the most difficult book of the series, as besides the “throw you in the universe with no narrative explanation” style of Erikson’s writing, it was the first and has many continuity issues of a sort with later books. The magic system is indeed slippery, though you might start getting the beginning of a handle on it after several volumes ;). I rather like it conceptually, but it is neither straightforwardly intuitive nor entirely spelled out. It is also pervasive, nuclear-bomb level, high-level AD&D campaign-strength magic, the exact opposite of Martin’s GoT universe.
As I’ve said elsewhere the Erikson/Esslemont books are good ( better than Hobb for my taste ), but not unalloyed triumphs IMO.
I’d say you’re buying into Kote/Kvothe’s take on things, as he doesn’t see his flaws. But hey, different people have different views. You don’t get a lot of conflict when your protagonist is mature and reasonable, so few are.
I agree that most of the characters lack depth - somewhat like Glen Cook’s work, they’re mostly sketched in (that one’s a lady’s man, this one’s a spoiled brat) and moved around on the scene.
I have long loved epic (and other) fantasy and read a lot of it in my youth. But lately so much of the fantasy I’ve read, or tried to read, or looked at as a possibility for reading, has disappointed me. Either the quality of writing or depth or believability or originality let me down, or it’s just not the kind of thing I’m looking for, for one reason or another—and one big reason is this:
Part of the reason I keep going back to Tolkien is that Middle Earth is a place I actually want to spend time in.
See, I was going to say “both” ;). Sometimes it works to his advantage and other times I think Erikson crawls over the top. Not quite Mieville-level “all-my-creations-must-wallow-in-pain” ( Erikson has more of a sense of humor ), but if you ask me he is sometimes a bit too extreme in his own brand of misery-wallowing.
Not to wander off topic but a lot of people have pointed out that Middle Earth would actually be a pretty bad place to live. The Lord of the Rings is presented from the viewpoint of a handful of people, most of whom are prestigious figures. But if you look past the main characters, you see masses of lower class soldiers and peasants being wiped out in the background.
I’m in the anti-Erikson camp. I wallowed through three or four of his books before giving up on them. Just not my style. I’ve posted my opinion on them elsewhere, but briefly, they’re incredibly bleak and depressing, where nothing good ever happens to anyone. Also, don’t plan on ever learning anything about the world outside of the armies and their wars. Why go to the trouble of building a universe if you’re just going to use it for fighting? Meh. Also, I know a lot of people rave about how he dumps you into the action without explanation, but what I took away from that is that there are generally very good reasons for authors to include explanations and background and stuff. I might have enjoyed them more if I were younger and single, and able to devote more time and brainpower to the task of following his stories along, but as it is, I just couldn’t get into them.
Personally, I think Glen Cook is more of the “show, don’t tell,” school of writing characters. The lack of lengthy exposition on the thoughts and motives may lead some to think his characters lack depth. Read The Dragon Never Sleeps, an engaging yet flawed science fiction novel of Cook’s for a great example.
Plus, the Black Company series centers around mercenary soldiers, with a generally simple worldview (“Us, and Them”).
One of the things I like about Cook’s work is that it draws me more into the world of his writing by giving me a feel that I’m there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the characters and seeing it as they do.
Lots and lots of exposition can make for an incredibly rich and detailed universe, but it can also take me out of the story by losing focus on what the people are doing. David Weber is a good example of this, for me.
Given what you liked about First Law, I have another suggestion for you that is a little farther afield. Bernard Cornwall wrote a historical series called *The Saxon Stories *starting with a novel called The Last Kingdom. They are set in England around the end of the 9th century, when the Danes were invading and Alfred the Great was defending the Saxon kingdoms. The narrator is able to go back and forth between the English and the Danes. They are well-written, gritty, and lack a sense of presentism that ruins a lot of historical fiction. And, of course, no real magic (though the characters believe in and try to practice magic).
I love the Erikson books, but they definitely take more effort than pretty much any other genre fiction. They’re long books, and they’re thick with characters and stuff happening rather than filler, and every now and then there will be a viewpoint or plot line you don’t care for that much that really drags but is also really important later on so you have to tough it out. If it ends up being your thing, though (and it’s certainly mine), it’s more rewarding than any other currently completed series I can think of. To use the OP’s rating scale, I’d probably go with 9/10.
That said, I’m one of those people who re-reads books a lot, and while I certainly hope to go back and read the entire Book of the Fallen again, it’s such a long and high-attention task that I should probably just go ahead and schedule it for the first few weeks of my retirement.
Of the other things mentioned in this thread that I’ve read:
I read the First Law trilogy relatively recently, and I get the appeal, but I don’t think it’s for me. It really does push past realism into depressing, and I don’t think the actual stories are good enough to make up for that. I’m unlikely to re-read these three, which is pretty rare for me with stuff I own rather than library. 4/10.
Mistborn and its two sequels are a bit more lightweight, and while I’m not as down on them as the OP, I think they’re probably the least of Sanderson’s work. I think the first book may even stand alone a bit better, and the middle book is definitely the weakest. 6/10.
A Song of Ice and Fire is up and down: like most seem to, I love the first few books and strongly dislike the more recent ones. They didn’t hold up as well on the second reading for me, but I’m still invested in where things are going. I’m also one of the readers who thinks the TV show has generally done a good job at editing things down, and is probably a better product overall. 6/10, with plenty of room to improve up to an 8 or so if it gets back on track.
I’m more charitable towards the Wheel of Time series than most. Jordan had his writing quirks and many of the middle books drag to one degree or another, but the only one I found completely unredeemable was Crossroads of Twilight, and I was quite happy with how Sanderson closed things out. The whole series is very “traditional” or even “old-fashioned” compared to the epics started in the last ten or fifteen years. I enjoyed a re-read of the series even more than my first go, both because I noticed a lot of the setup and because I knew what parts were thoroughly skimmable. 8/10.
The Name of the Wind was probably my favorite series-starter ever; the follow-up wasn’t quite as good, but I have no problem giving The Kingkiller Chronicle the seal of approval at this point. Like the OP, the author’s progress on the third book is getting frustrating, but that holds for many of the currently-in-progress series. I’d go with a 9/10 at this point based off of the brilliance of the first novel and the competence of the second.
I like The Dresden Files, but I wouldn’t really put it in with the other series in this thread; however, Codex Alera fits into the “comfort-food” side of the genre quite well, and it’s really enjoyable as long as you aren’t expecting too much. The plan for the series is evident from the start, and Butcher is really good at doing fun, climactic moments. Sometimes you don’t care if everything is a perfect, unlikely coincidence, as long as it’s awesome when it happens. That’s this series. 7/10.
One person briefly mentioned The Riyria Revelations by Sullivan, and that’s another good one that is pretty traditional fantasy comfort food. It starts pretty raw - this is one of the gems of the internet self-publishing era, but most of those gems start raw - but it grows well over the course of the series. I like to read stuff on my Kindle while I’m at the gym that is entertaining, takes me away to another world, but doesn’t take TOO much thought or concentration. This series and Alera are both squarely in that wheelhouse, and I’ll probably be re-reading them each once a year at the gym forever. 6/10.
To get back to Sanderson, one other person mentioned The Stormlight Archive, his current series. It’s a big step up from Mistborn, probably on the level of WoT or a bit better. Again, it’s very traditional epic fantasy, without any modern grimdark, but it’s very well executed. Sanderon is also one of the most prolific writers working, so if anyone does get into his stuff, there’s a lot out there and he’s releasing multiple full length novels and several novellas each year. 7/10 with potential to improve to an 8 or 9 for the Archive; I’d actually recommend instead that someone new to Sanderson check out Warbreaker and/or the short story The Emperor’s Soul.
For my own contribution, I’ll throw out the Raven’s Shadow series by Anthony Ryan. The first book, Blood Song, came out a few years ago via the internet-self-publishing route; it did extremely well, was re-published by a major publisher last year, and the second book just came out a couple of weeks ago. The first book was excellent: similar style to Rothfuss in some ways, very different world and story, overall a very raw author with lots of potential. The second book is stylistically a bit closer to Martin, moving between viewpoint characters and with some darker turns (including some rape-y stuff that fit in the story but I wasn’t super comfortable with, which would be my big caveat in recommending this whole-heartedly). 7/10, again with potential to improve.
I’m definitely going to be trying out some of the other books recommended in this thread as well. As an aside, I felt bad about not using the entirety of my rating scale, but then I saw the mention of Goodkind and remembered that I read several of those books in high school… that series is a legit 1/10.
It’s interesting to me that so many people in the thread share this feeling. Normally, I’m totally on-board with this: I hate Jude the Obscure-type novels where everyone is just getting shat on for 500 pages and then they die. Why would you want to depress yourself like that?
But I didn’t get that out of The First Law at all. One of the two main plots is a traditional let’s-go-on-a-quest-for-the-macguffin, which isn’t depressing. And the other is, yes, an inquisitor/torturer – but he’s totally Tyrion Lannister before Tyrion Lannister was cool, and he spends most of his time making other people’s lives magnificently horrible. Which is something I think we can all root for.
Again, it’s just interesting to me that apparently I totally missed the zeitgeist of that book as interpreted by most Dopers.
I just read The Name of the Wind directly after the first law trilogy - a mistake, as a brain scrub was indeed required. Spent the first 100 pages aghast at the soft girlie shite afore my eyes. I got over this Abercrombie-ing and settled into it nicely - great read. Although still had moments where the inner Bloody nine was roaring STOP PONCING ABOUT AND GET ON WITH KILLING SOMEONE.
Thought it suffered a bit in comparison to stuff from Mieville, Abercrombie, Erikson etc in that it feels v conventional. Not really taking the genre anywhere different (Erikson is not really doing anything different, but he is amping things up to eleven). That’s maybe being a bit harsh on it, but I’d read some really passionate recommendations placing it in the very top drawer of modern fantasy, and didn’t feel it was quite up there.
Need to read the next one, might put it in a different light.
Kvothe’s flaws tend to be things like “being too awesome and special, and so people get jealous of my awesomeness.” As actual flaws go,they’re pretty eye-rolling.
I kinda think that’s why its taking so long to finish the series. The original set up had an older Kvothe ruined with regret about past mistakes. But Rothantuss doesn’t seem to really have what it takes to bring his character anywhere close to the moral event horizon, so he’s written himself into a corner.
Couldn’t agree more. Abercrombie spends so much time trying to subvert the heroic genre that he didn’t realise that he went too far in the other direction, he made everything nasty and painful and its every bit as boring and unrealistic as any world of heroic knights and farmboys becoming kings.
He is also impatient, cocky and really really can’t control himself when he should leading him into way more trouble than he would have otherwise. They are not flaws like Jamie Lannister or the Bloody Nine have, but they are the flaws you would expect a teenage prodigy raised by a traveling troupe to have.
