I’ve always loved fantasy series.  And archaeology and anthropology.  And long sagas and grimdark history, so when my husband recommended Steven Erikson‘s Malazan Book of the Fallen series (which I believe was up to about #3 at the time), I gladly checked it out.  I was enthralled with the first few books.  Great military fantasy with an absorbing magic system and compelling characters!  A truly diverse range of peoples and appearances and gods and yeah!

After a while, I started feeling Malazan fatigue.  It’s a big slog of a saga, ten books in all (not to mention material from Erikson’s old gaming/plotting partner Ian Esslemont).  It suffers from what I call “Guy Gavriel Kay Disease” (with love, because I do love Kay), in that every badass you meet is slightly more badass than the last badass until it gets sort of ridiculous.  Kay doesn’t go beyond trilogies, so he’s never reached that eventual tipping point of ludicrous levels of power, but Erikson has ten books in which to up the ante, and by book six, I was expecting someone who could split the world with a glare.

Short story long, I abandoned the series before book eight.  I didn’t want to.  I just couldn’t fathom ordering another massive doorstop from Amazon UK and then trying to remember the huge matrix of characters and cultures.  So!  Given that I’m currently in a period of underemployment, it’s a great time to go back, give it another go, and blog every few chapters to see what I think of the whole thing.  I don’t promise anything; it’s a huge slog of a series, as I said.  But I’ll start and give it a whirl, and we’ll see what happens.

Of course, note that I’m going to be blogging plot like crazy.  I hate spoiler complaints, hate them.  And this is a series that was published between 1999 and 2011.  But still:  spoilers!  Nothing but spoilers!