Nah, I might be much less picky with fantasy than with sci-fi (read too much and have little tolerance) so it could be ok. I’ll report back in a couple months :P
I’m going to feel especially uncultured and uncouth if Erikson’s prose is too primitive and poor for Juan’s tastes, given that he speaks English as a second language while I was a Journalism major born in the US.
(And that’s not a slight against your excellent English, Juan; mostly just picking on myself for apparently having very bad taste/appreciation for writing)
Ha, I am much less tolerant to sloppy prose in English (except for a couple guilty pleasures here and there) than in Spanish.
It has to do with having read way more bad prose in Spanish than in English, so you build a tolerance. I don’t think I was able to fully read a novel in English until I was 16 or so, so while my tastes were still suspect then, I was more picky, and I kept reading mainly in Spanish until my early 20s. By the time I was reading mostly in English (I would say 90% of my reading is in English now) I was very picky with what I chose to spend time in. Couple that with a lot of my reading in Spanish being translations (and genre books do not get the best translators most of the time) and that means I’m used to horrible Spanish prose and don’t care that much.
I also think as a second language reader you are in general more perceptive to small details that you tend to gloss over when reading your native language.
I was going to say, I think people who actually properly learn a language (as a second or onwards language) almost certainly have a better understanding and awareness of the rules of that language than people who’ve just kind of absorbed the language as we grew.
I completely agree with the review. I love some of the characters, the story winds around and I have no idea where its going, and I THINK it is based on an old rpg. But Chain of Dogs? That was some serious shit. Was that Book 4 or 5? Man that was good.
I didn’t really read the whole thread (damn Comcast outage and I am catching up) , but Chain of Dogs was excellent. In my opinion. And I liked the whole series anyways even if it was strangely odd.
The Chain of Dogs was in Deadhouse Gates (i.e., book 2.). Hence it coming up in the review and thread.
Congratulaions to Tom for correctly rating these books! I would go into all the flaws of this series, but I like the people who like the series too much to do that (ok just one: The events are repetitve; the author writes one scene, decides he likes it, and then writes the same scene 3-5 more times. Zing!) Instead could I recommend the Black Company series by Glen Cook? The Black Company has many similarities to Malazan: hard bitten soldiers, gritty battles, and strange magic. One big difference though is that Glen Cook had actual military experience during Vietnam, and it turns out that military experience is actually really helpful if you want to write a gritty military series. It’s the difference between Laird Barron, and an alt-universe version of Laird Barron where he wrote the same general stories but had never traveled, drank, performed physical labor, or done anything at all besides handle insurance claims at a suburban office park. The non-experienced version just comes off as cringey whenever he aims for gritty.
Ok, and now one last plug for Black Company: It’s about a mercenary company performing COIN operations for Mordor while dealing with the internal politics of the ring-wraiths. It’s also surprisingly warm hearted. Oh! And Myth II also borrows super-heavily from Black Company. So if you like Myth II you will like Black Company.
I loved the Black Company books, but they’re about a tenth as ambitious as the Malazan books, if that. (That’s actually part of the point, really - they’re the grunt’s eye view of magical war.) And IMO, Erikson achieves his ambitions.
I read Gardens of the Moon several years ago and thought it was Immortan Joe-level mediocre even then. I wouldn’t give it a moment’s time these days. I wouldn’t have called Bakker “military fantasy” at all, really, despite some army stuff in Thousandfold Thought, but I have yet to get around to reading Aspect-Emperor.
Y’all are not making it easy on me:
“Oh, a new fantasy epic, I should check it out!”
“It’s the best one ever? Great!”
“But it is ten thousand-page books…? Well, I’ll just check out the first one.”
“But the first one is really not that great? Ok, skip it.”
“But I can’t? I have to commit to two thousands of pages before I’ll know if I like it?”
“…What do I do?!”
I mean, you can do the wiki plot summary of gardens. It’s inadequate, and blanks can be filled in. But you’ll not have the full appreciation of some of the characters in Deadhouse.
I’ll second this, for all I think that Abercrombie is kind of a middle-of-the road writer (though Bayaz is an amazing character and Red Country really is a fantastic novel.) Heroes really is the best balls-to-the-wall account of a single fantasy-setting battle from the ground level.
I’ve not read the Expanse (because it’s not finished), but Daniel Abraham (who is one half of The Expanse’s author) wrote The Long Price, which is my favorite fantasy epic ever. I’m pretty sensitive to bad prose. It’s hard to believe that The Expanse is so bad.
Yeah, The Long Price is fantastic. The Expanse doesn’t quite reach that level (I’m sure having to coordinate with another author doesn’t help) but it’s up there.
Depends on what you qualify as bad. It’s definitely not unreadable since I read 6 whole books, but eventually it lost me when it became clear the plot was not going to be specacular anyway. For me it’s the lack of subtlety of it all that becomes a deal breaker. It’s not purple prose or anything, it’s just that the characters all read flat and stereotypical (at least up to book 6). And there’s a little bit of reiteration and overstating and no room for imagination.
I dunno, I know I’m in the minority here, so I’m open to be wrong, but I just took a look at the first chapter of the first book and got the same impression as when I read it for the first time.
I’m glad to know others have taken as long to read these books as I have. I, literally, spent years getting through the series the first time and, outside of some of the philosophical musings in the later books, I enjoyed every minute of it when I wasn’t confused.
I don’t read fantasy anymore because of these books, much like Frank Herbert killed scifi for me, only there I read him first.
I’m reading the series a second time while reading the spinoff books and am shocked at the level of foreshadowing I’m seeing. Even the seemingly abrupt tone change for a particular god in the last book is envisioned early on. There’s something to be said for writing your books after you’ve played your P&P game for years and year as you can then go back in and fill in the details (or retcon, really).
The Malazan books seem like something I would’ve loved over 20 years ago when I was attending university. But unfortunately (for myself), as I get older I find myself having less and less patience for authors who are willfully obfuscating. On my best friend’s recommendation (like many here, the Malazan books are his all-time favourite fantasy series) I tried reading GotM and bounced-off, hard, after about 200 pages. That’s the average length of a Fritz Leiber book (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser). Only in the genre of epic fantasy is 200 pages considered too few to form an informed opinion.
I think ultimately, for me, it comes down to the fact that I enjoy character studies and vivid descriptions over intricate plotting. Especially intricate plotting that requires the reader to hold 10,000 pages of information in their head. I forget where I put my glasses before going to sleep, how am I going to remember 10,000 pages lol.
Which segues nicely into my final paragraph. Someone mentioned Abercrombie, Cook and Sanderson. I adore Abercrombie. Love his ‘all humanity is scum’ attitude, his setting (future Earth, after nuclear Armageddon), and above all his characters. The Bloody-Nine is un-fucking-forgettable, but every book is packed with contrasting personalities and surprising characters. Cook (The Black Company) and Sanderson (The Way of Kings, yes, but not Mistborn, too YA) I also enjoyed greatly, while, in my opinion, the Expanse has more than acceptable writing, that, although not great, is far from poor.
Perfectly put, Mr. Striker. I intend to steal this line. I might also have to filch the bit about not being able to find your glasses.
Is that this?
-Tom
Yes. Although personally I think The Heroes is his best book, and it’s largely standalone (there’s a character or two from the First Law trilogy but you’ll know what you need to know about them in context), if you want a little less of a commitment.
The what now setting?
Man, I missed that! There are definitely a number of fantasy books with that sort of setting (Shannara, Mark Lawrence’s first trilogy at the minimum, I am sure others) but I have no recollection of anything in the First Law books or the standalones in the setting that would indicate that to be the case there. I guess I haven’t read the YA ones he did, maybe they are?