I started reading the Malazan books again, since @Mayobrot kept tooting the horn… I’m about 100 pages in, but reading a German translation because that’s what we have in this home. The wizard battle of Pale I remembered, and the first appearance of Anomander Rake, and that weird style where you get partial internal monologue that still doesn’t make sense because you can’t know what they know, making you think that the world is so much bigger than what you are reading. A bit like Dune, I guess. This time around I’m paying attention to the year indicators at the beginnings of chapters. That makes many things less confusing.
This is not my first time reading it – at least for the first few books. I think the first time around I stopped reading around *Toll the Hounds* which is book 8 I think? So it’ll be recap time for a few weeks. 😂
I always feel like emphasizing that I need to read so much more in German – because I stoped with volume 14 in German 😂 Damn German words be so loooooong. The first book has 800 pages and is the entire *Gardens of the Moon* translation, I think. @bwebster looked it up on Wikipedia and said the English version has 712 pages. I had heard somewhere that German is 33% longer on average, for all texts, so I would have expected the English to be 600 pages. Now I’m less vindicated than I thought. 😅
At the time, the dragging German translations was why my wife eventually stopped reading. I had read *Gardens of the Moon* in English because I had gotten it from friends but then my wife started to read the books as well and we bought the rest in German. Switching from English to German was super weird because some of the proper names were translated as well. “Pale” is “Fahl”, for example.
For now, perhaps the goal can be 100 pages per day? Time will tell.
What’s also different this time around is that there’s so much more Internet. We’ll see whether it makes a difference.
India, Josh, Peter, and AJ are reading The Malazan Book of the Fallen. A bad idea? Maybe, but we’ll at least have fun along the way. Peter has read the series before, but it’s Josh, India, and AJ’s first time. Join us, as we talk through each book and enjoy the works of Steven Erikson. – Ten Very Big Books - A Malazan Readthrough Podcast
Welcome to the Malazan Read and Re-read of the Fallen! Your hosts are Bill Capossere (reading the series for a second time) and Amanda Rutter (reading it for the first time). Join us as we read, reread, discuss, summarize, analyze, scratch our heads in confusion, wonder out loud, possibly argue (courteously), occasionally criticize (also courteously), marvel, and at times (we’re sure) bow to the superior knowledge of Tor.com’s readers as we attempt to dissect the epic fantasy world created by Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont. – Malazan Reread of the Fallen
Ten Very Big Books - A Malazan Readthrough Podcast
#Books #Malazan
a closed book next to a glass of water and a newspaper
500 pages to go:
A Malazan halfway retrospective
As for me: 400 pages into the first book of the Malazan empire and the nice wizard and the only remotely positive romantic relationship is a goner. Weird how many of these pages have strong imagery that I still remember. I couldn’t have named anybody, but as I reread the scenes, I sometimes remember them and I wonder: is there nothing worth remembering in the remaining books or am I going to remember after reading? The warrens, the Jaghut and the T’lan Imass remain the most interesting parts of the setting.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/steven-eriksons-malazan-book-fallen-tor-publishing-group-books
Many of the criticisms are valid: it’s confusing (it’s also because the people in the story are confused, often enough); the emotional lives are shallow; there are a gazillion characters; new stuff keeps getting introduced until the very end – but the cool parts are a giant world, with a deep history, where people have interesting long term plans.
As my wife likes to say: this is a series where the point is not to get anywhere, or resolve anything, it’s a series that makes you be in another world and the point is to be reading and experiencing that world. It works for me.
recommended reading order by the authors
I bought the Malazan bundle because I only own the first few books in the main series on paper so I cannot comment on starting with the other series, first. I guess the question is, to take it a field that I know better: would you recommend friends wanting to get into Tolkien to start with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion? When you start with The Lord of the Rings then you get the benefit of that deep past and mysterious references that make it great. Of course, the Malazan books have many more mysterious references. 😅
