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Gaius Marius posted:If you start a series you are legally obligated to finish it, the whole thing no exceptions *checks thread title* Oh god no
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Dec 6, 2023 12:27
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Kestral posted:For the folks who've read Malazan, should I try to get back into it if I stopped during or just after Memories of Ice? I've read Deadhouse Gates and The Bonehunters. I clearly remember quite a few characters and images (which is a great sign!) but didn't feel strongly compelled to keep going.
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Dec 6, 2023 16:31
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I read the whole mazalan series and it mostly made me pissed off that he took some good ideas and then either did nothing with them or explained them to death. also goddamn I get it war is brutal why is there so much rape i do not need that amount of rape in my fictional reading
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Dec 6, 2023 17:06
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Malazan is grimdark fantasy taken to excess and I respect that but I couldn't stomach it
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Dec 6, 2023 17:12
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StrixNebulosa posted:Malazan is grimdark fantasy taken to excess and I respect that but I couldn't stomach it This thesis isn't immediately clear of course, but over time? Yeah.
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Dec 6, 2023 18:29
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I'm a Malazan fan myself, and I think House of Chains and Midnight Tides are among the higher points of the series, but yeah, if you're not enjoying it, don't force yourself further.
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Dec 6, 2023 19:13
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dwarf74 posted:It's weird, because I came away with the exact opposite opinion - it's fundamentally about the importance of compassion, and that anything dark in it is to show the contrast. It's hard to see that as a theme after the chain of dogs' ending and the scene where a man kills so many zealots a multi-story house is literally filled floor to ceiling with corpses. Like I sound sarcastic but the series goes brutally dark and gore-y.
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Dec 6, 2023 19:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:It's hard to see that as a theme after the chain of dogs' ending and the scene where a man kills so many zealots a multi-story house is literally filled floor to ceiling with corpses. Later in the series it becomes even more clear, as you learn more about the main antagonist, etc. Main characters like Fiddler, Tehol, and Trull Sengar are basically defined by it. And seriously fuckin Itkovian in MoI itself (and later). Other themes imo are "civilization is good actually," "we have learned things over time and old poo poo is not better," "war mostly hurts the people who aren't responsible for it," and of course "explosions are cool."
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Dec 6, 2023 20:19
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Anybody found any new (last three months) slice of life / cozy stuff? The new Legends & Lattes was good, but I need more.
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Dec 6, 2023 21:29
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I should clarify here, it's not that I'm not enjoying it right now, it's that my last attempt at Malazan happened ~20 years ago, so I can't remember how I was feeling about the next couple books, and why I might have stopped indefinitely on a series that I should by all accounts enjoy, even though the next two or three books were out. I know I loved Gardens of the Moon, despite it being apparently the weakest in the series, and I flipped through my copy of Deadhouse and the prose seems perfectly acceptable. But it does seem from the reactions here that Malazan may have a common falling-off point, and that might be what did it for me. Hmm, I'm going to have to think about this one. General Battuta posted:I've read Deadhouse Gates and The Bonehunters. I clearly remember quite a few characters and images (which is a great sign!) but didn't feel strongly compelled to keep going. Wait, aren't there three whole books and over 2,000 pages worth of Malazan between Deadhouse Gates and Bonehunters?  Unrelated, I got back into Saga of Pliocene Exile and boy, whoever said the second book was basically the first book but much crazier was dead on. I think I'm actually more on board with it now that it's gone full science-fantasy, which is my favorite genre, so I'm more willing to overlook the goofy dialogue. "Friggerty" is not a good substitute for "gently caress," Julian May! It may be a struggle to get through Nonborn King because I'm sure King Ludonn Aiken Drum  is going to be infuriating, but the inevitability of glorious comeuppance will see me through.
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Dec 6, 2023 21:54
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Kestral, I am probably the wrong person to say this as my reading list is basically this right now: (I am very very anxious about some IRL stuff and I am coping by adding more books to the pile) (e: I'm rereading some comfort food and reading some new stuff and while it's inconvenient to lug a giant stack between my reading spots, it's weirdly soothing) but I'm firmly in the camp of "if you have an impulse to read something, do it". If you want to read Malazan, give it a go! Something about it is clearly calling to you enough to make you post about it, why not reread Gardens of the Moon? I too enjoyed that book - honestly more than the others in some ways.
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Dec 6, 2023 22:06
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Kestral posted:Wait, aren't there three whole books and over 2,000 pages worth of Malazan between Deadhouse Gates and Bonehunters? Probably, but I didn't have much trouble following what had happened between — or at least it didn't seem like there were an out of the ordinary number of random things going on.
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Dec 6, 2023 22:32
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tokenbrownguy posted:Anybody found any new (last three months) slice of life / cozy stuff? Did you read the goblin emperor sequels (Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones)? They’re not quite cozy, but I thought they were quiet and enjoyable. Wikipedia calls them “fantasy of manners”.
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Dec 6, 2023 22:40
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Kestral posted:Unrelated, I got back into Saga of Pliocene Exile and boy, whoever said the second book was basically the first book but much crazier was dead on. I think I'm actually more on board with it now that it's gone full science-fantasy, which is my favorite genre, so I'm more willing to overlook the goofy dialogue. "Friggerty" is not a good substitute for "gently caress," Julian May! It may be a struggle to get through Nonborn King because I'm sure King Ludonn Aiken Drum i just love all her characters, they're so individually distinct with their own voice even for the bit parts who get murdered shortly afterwards, and she makes it look effortless.
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Dec 6, 2023 22:43
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High five fellow Sagara-reader! I spent the summer rereading Heyer (and found much oog) then read the one that just came out and am rereading the series. Absolute comfort food for me.
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Dec 6, 2023 22:50
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xiw posted:i just love all her characters, they're so individually distinct with their own voice even for the bit parts who get murdered shortly afterwards, and she makes it look effortless. It's just so fuckin gonzo, it's great. A bunch of capital p problematic bits, fair warning, but the whole thing just nails mythic ultra epic sweep while also being really tightly grounded in character.
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Dec 6, 2023 23:01
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The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Volume One: Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, and Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0741VJC4D/ The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Volume Two: Swords Against Wizardry, The Swords of Lankhmar, and Swords and Ice Magic by Fritz Leiber - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L8WP9LR/ The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B3S9TLS/
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Dec 6, 2023 23:18
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If you love swords & sorcery, you must read Leiber. You'll have fun, and you will also see the origins of a lot of things that become standard in the genre.
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Dec 6, 2023 23:44
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As always the advice for the first volume in these, Swords and Deviltry, is to either skip it entirely or just read "Ill Met in Lankhmar" on your first go around. It's prequel lore bullshit written much later than the stuff everyone loves.
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Dec 6, 2023 23:55
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Arsenic Lupin posted:If you love swords & sorcery, you must read Leiber. You'll have fun, and you will also see the origins of a lot of things that become standard in the genre. Seconded. I also highly recommend Mike Mignola's faithful comic adaptation of some of the early stories, including Ill Met in Lankhmar. His style works perfectly for the material, and I think the art is up there with the best of his Hellboy/BPRD work.
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Dec 7, 2023 02:52
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mllaneza posted:This book is so deliciously bleak. It's just loaded with amazing set pieces, even more so than Consider Phlebas. Oh woah, which book is this in? Also this reminds me that I have Against a Dark Background on my shelf and need to reread it, love that book.
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Dec 7, 2023 11:42
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Awkward Davies posted:Did you read the goblin emperor sequels (Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones)? They’re not quite cozy, but I thought they were quiet and enjoyable. Wikipedia calls them “fantasy of manners”. I was pretty lukewarm on the goblin emperor but loved those other two, an impoverished priest, given a job because they're a distant imperial relative speaks to the dead and helps solve mysteries, while struggling with connection to the living. It's slow paced, fairly low stakes mystery but I would recommend them to anyone.
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Dec 7, 2023 11:58
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occluded posted:Oh woah, which book is this in? Also this reminds me that I have Against a Dark Background on my shelf and need to reread it, love that book. It gets written off for exactly the reasons I love it, it's a mcguffin driven adventure story based around incredible set pieces. The monastery with the chain tracks being a particular favourite of mine.
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Dec 7, 2023 12:03
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Kestral posted:I should clarify here, it's not that I'm not enjoying it right now, it's that my last attempt at Malazan happened ~20 years ago, so I can't remember how I was feeling about the next couple books, and why I might have stopped indefinitely on a series that I should by all accounts enjoy, even though the next two or three books were out. I know I loved Gardens of the Moon, despite it being apparently the weakest in the series, and I flipped through my copy of Deadhouse and the prose seems perfectly acceptable. But it does seem from the reactions here that Malazan may have a common falling-off point, and that might be what did it for me. Hmm, I'm going to have to think about this one. Iirc many people got off the Malazan wagon because…Midnight tides? Shifted the location and central characters for the book just as everyone was all hype about Karsa and everything else going on there. I think that kind of happens a few times and he does like to pull the “you thought these guys where the good guys and these guys bad guys huh?? Well it’s not that simple!” Thing. Oh and everyone’s power levels are always absurd
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Dec 7, 2023 14:15
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Levitate posted:Iirc many people got off the Malazan wagon because…Midnight tides? Shifted the location and central characters for the book just as everyone was all hype about Karsa and everything else going on there. I think that kind of happens a few times and he does like to pull the “you thought these guys where the good guys and these guys bad guys huh?? Well it’s not that simple!” Thing. Oh and everyone’s power levels are always absurd One thing that gets glosses over with Malazan is how structurally *weird* it can be. As you say, it jumps around all over the world, but even some of the individual books can be weird. Like Midnight Tides is one half grim Shakespearean tragedy, one half sex-farce. Toll the Hounds is 90% brooding meditations on grief, 10% over the top anime showdown. I don't think MT quite nails the contrast, but I like that he tried. And the grim tragedy half is really loving good.
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Dec 7, 2023 14:58
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tokenbrownguy posted:Anybody found any new (last three months) slice of life / cozy stuff? To Shape a Dragon's Breath ends up being moderately cozy, although not slice of life.
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Dec 7, 2023 15:04
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Levitate posted:Iirc many people got off the Malazan wagon because…Midnight tides? Shifted the location and central characters for the book just as everyone was all hype about Karsa and everything else going on there. I think that kind of happens a few times and he does like to pull the “you thought these guys where the good guys and these guys bad guys huh?? Well it’s not that simple!” Thing. Oh and everyone’s power levels are always absurd Well, not everyone. That's one of the things I enjoy about Malazan -- the cast includes both world-shaking demigods and ordinary grunts, and Erikson gives equal attention to both ends of the spectrum.
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Dec 7, 2023 16:49
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I've mentioned this before but I tried to read malazan over my honeymoon because we went to New Zealand for the hobbits and had a lot of long plane flights. I got eight books in before I gave up. I get why people read it but for me it was just this incredibly painful combination of "my anime character can beat up your anime character" and "time for a thousand page loredump." So I edited a gratuitous apostrophe into the Malazan thread title and nobody even noticed for years
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Dec 7, 2023 16:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I got eight books in before I gave up. I get why people read it but for me it was just this incredibly painful combination of "my anime character can beat up your anime character" and "time for a thousand page loredump." Same. The fans are passionate and the themes do sound fun (if maybe a bit well worn tbh) but this was the reality of it for me: big ageless anime characters slamming into other anime characters over and over, all with different if ultimately shallow combinations of MtG colours of magic and magical realms. Erikson’s anthropologist/archaeologist background didn’t shine through for me either because it was hard to get any real feel for deep time when there all these ultra dudes crashing around the place. On a prose and general thoughtfulness level Erikson’s infinitely better than Sanderson but I got a similar impression that the settings were built for video games, so when I learned that Malazan literally was designed as an RPG backdrop, I was unsurprised.
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Dec 7, 2023 17:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
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Dec 7, 2023 17:28
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occluded posted:Oh woah, which book is this in? Also this reminds me that I have Against a Dark Background on my shelf and need to reread it, love that book. Sorry, I do not remember which Culture book that was in.
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Dec 7, 2023 17:41
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I read Gardens of the Moon three times before I felt like I had 'got into it', then read Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice and gave up. I don't really know why, because I love fantasy, but somehow I just bounced off it again. I did appreciate the archeology / anthropology nature of the T'lann and Jahgut etc. But bounced off the stuff in Memories of Ice with the two time travelling guys? did I recall that right. Icariun? I can't remember his deal. . I introduced my friend to it around the same time and he has read the entire series twice, he's just starting again. It's a bit of a marmite series.
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Dec 7, 2023 19:00
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GhastlyBizness posted:Same. The fans are passionate and the themes do sound fun (if maybe a bit well worn tbh) but this was the reality of it for me: big ageless anime characters slamming into other anime characters over and over, all with different if ultimately shallow combinations of MtG colours of magic and magical realms. Erikson’s anthropologist/archaeologist background didn’t shine through for me either because it was hard to get any real feel for deep time when there all these ultra dudes crashing around the place. Thing is, if it were just ultra dudes crashing around the place: ok, cool, I'll read that. If it were just loredumps, hell, I've spent a slow week at work reading the Warhammer wiki. It was just something about how all those elements clashed . Why does the lore matter if it's just ultradudes? If I'm here for ultradudes, why are we spending all this time on geology lessons?
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Dec 7, 2023 19:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I've mentioned this before but I tried to read malazan over my honeymoon because we went to New Zealand for the hobbits and had a lot of long plane flights. What gets me (even though I liked the series) is how often you'd have some character go "oh my god his power levels are out of this world!" and then a book or three that later that same character is all "you thought that guy was powerful hah I am actually just as or more powerful" Then again maybe it's faulty memory on my end and that didn't happen as often as I thought. IIRC he did have an interesting thing with how these powerful gods and beings tended to spiral to conflict in a power attracts power kind of way. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Thing is, if it were just ultra dudes crashing around the place: ok, cool, I'll read that. If it were just loredumps, hell, I've spent a slow week at work reading the Warhammer wiki. It was just something about how all those elements clashed . Why does the lore matter if it's just ultradudes? If I'm here for ultradudes, why are we spending all this time on geology lessons? I dunno, I do think he ties it all together in a lot of ways but when you're waiting for it to tie together over 100,000 pages then it's certainly easy to get to the not caring anymore phase.
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Dec 7, 2023 19:35
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There is kind of a recurring theme in Malazan where people are all terrified of an ancient and legendary power, only to find out it's barely a threat now because they've learned a lot of new tricks in the past few thousand years. I like that for its inversion of the classic fantasy theosophy-lite idea of an idealized magical past and lost secrets of power. (And I think this is showing off his archeology background, here.) Gods and dragons get blown up by explosives and defeated by mortals who learned to magic better. Like, in one of the books an ancient evil gets woken up and then proceeds to get absolutely punked by everything it comes across. It's hilarious to me. But if you aren't expecting the inversion, it can come across as weird.
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Dec 7, 2023 20:35
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For slice of life cozy fantasy, I enjoyed "Cozy isekai craftsman". Basically this guy gets visited by a god of another world who offers him good health and a spot in their world, and he just had to live there. No major league fantasy land slogs across the continent, just stuff in town. Blaise Corvin is the author. Think there's 2 books out now, on KU. Cursed Cocktails/sword and thistle were both pretty good. Guy leaves the army and decides to open a bar. S.L. Rowland is the author. KU as well, and the books are same universe/city/fantasy world but different protags.
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Dec 7, 2023 20:52
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dwarf74 posted:
Ooh, big scary monster from the ancient world, destroyed entire civilizations, woken up and is hungry, hm? Here, chew on this, we call it a "cusser".
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Dec 7, 2023 22:15
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Strom Cuzewon posted:One thing that gets glosses over with Malazan is how structurally *weird* it can be. As you say, it jumps around all over the world, but even some of the individual books can be weird. Like Midnight Tides is one half grim Shakespearean tragedy, one half sex-farce. Toll the Hounds is 90% brooding meditations on grief, 10% over the top anime showdown. The sex farce stuff is really bad, the vaguely wodehousian drawing room comedy is surprisingly good. Then entrails start spilling over everything. Such a weird series.
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Dec 7, 2023 22:27
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sebmojo posted:The sex farce stuff is really bad, the vaguely wodehousian drawing room comedy is surprisingly good. Then entrails start spilling over everything. Such a weird series. You know, that's the only description that's ever tempted me to read it.
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Dec 7, 2023 22:32
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I would recommend everyone to read a bit, it's not quite like anything else, but it's a combination of extremely bad and extremely good so it is not an uncomplicated recommend as a whole.
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Dec 7, 2023 22:40
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