{"id":288,"date":"2013-10-07T17:06:43","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T21:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/45.79.82.122\/blogs\/natterings\/?p=288"},"modified":"2013-10-07T20:52:32","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T00:52:32","slug":"blogging-malazan-book-1-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/?p=288","title":{"rendered":"Blogging Malazan, Book 1:  Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always loved fantasy series. \u00a0And archaeology and anthropology. \u00a0And long sagas and grimdark history, so when my husband recommended <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevenerikson.com\">Steven Erikson<\/a>&#8216;s\u00a0<em>Malazan Book of the Fallen<\/em> series (which I believe was up to about #3 at the time), I gladly checked it out. \u00a0I was enthralled with the first few books. \u00a0Great military fantasy with an absorbing magic system and compelling characters! \u00a0A truly diverse range of peoples and appearances and gods and yeah!<\/p>\n<p>After a while, I started feeling Malazan fatigue. \u00a0It&#8217;s a\u00a0<em>big<\/em> slog of a saga, ten books in all (not to mention material from Erikson&#8217;s old gaming\/plotting partner Ian Esslemont). \u00a0It suffers from what I call &#8220;Guy Gavriel Kay Disease&#8221; (with love, because I do love Kay), in that every badass you meet is slightly more badass than the <em>last<\/em> badass until it gets sort of ridiculous. \u00a0Kay doesn&#8217;t go beyond trilogies, so he&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Short story long, I abandoned the series before book eight. \u00a0I didn&#8217;t <em>want<\/em> to. \u00a0I just couldn&#8217;t fathom ordering another massive doorstop from Amazon UK and then trying to remember the huge matrix of characters and cultures. \u00a0So! \u00a0Given that I&#8217;m currently in a period of underemployment, it&#8217;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. \u00a0I don&#8217;t promise anything; it&#8217;s a <em>huge slog<\/em> of a series, as I said. \u00a0But I&#8217;ll start and give it a whirl, and we&#8217;ll see what happens.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, note that I&#8217;m going to be blogging plot like crazy. \u00a0I hate spoiler complaints, hate them. \u00a0And this is a series that was published between 1999 and 2011. \u00a0But still: \u00a0spoilers! \u00a0Nothing but spoilers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always loved fantasy series. \u00a0And archaeology and anthropology. \u00a0And long sagas and grimdark history, so when my husband recommended Steven Erikson&#8216;s\u00a0Malazan Book of the Fallen series (which I believe was up to about #3 at the time), I gladly checked it out. \u00a0I was enthralled with the first few books. \u00a0Great military fantasy with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}