I figured this deserved its own thread even though only about 8 of you are going to be interested.
The Crippled God, by Steven Erikson, is the 10th and final book of the massive series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. For those of you who only like to read completed series, you can start reading this now. With what little time I give myself, I’ve been reading this series for the last 3 years, finishing book 9 this past December. It’s been an effort at times to keep track of the litany of characters and plots, but I’ve persevered and have been rewarded for it.
Has anyone else on the board made it to this point in the series?
Tomorrow’s a great day for fantasy; The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss is also coming out tomorrow.
I’ve got about 300 pages left to go on Dust of Dreams before I pick it up but am looking forward to it. Here’s a (relatively) spoiler-free review whcih looks pretty positive.
I’ve tried reading the first one, and couldn’t get into it, but I did the same thing with Game of Thrones - read the first chapter four or five times, never liked it, then BANG! the sixth time caught and I love the series. Of course, it’s not done, so Malazan is very intriguing. People like it and it’s finished.
In some ways Erikson is really, really bad writer, but he has an overflowing imagination and a superb skill at building a complicated world with endless layers of history. I often find it hard to recommend him, despite reading roughly 15000 pages of his books (re-read most of the series before I read the 9th book). Some parts of the series just make you groan, the “romances” are utterly atrocious, the pseudo-philosophical drivel all of his characters tend to spout is boring and long-winded and so on and so on … yet he manages to craft a degree of epicness to all of it that makes slogging through it all worth it to me and to many other readers.
If I remember right, the first book is somewhat different than the rest. I think he was constricted by his editor/publisher when he was still an unknown and it wasn’t until book two when he was able to go all out since the first one sold decently well.
It won’t be out in Canada until the 15th. It was supposed to be out on Feb 15, but Erikson’s crappy publishers pushed it back a week, and then a full month.
