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Has anyone tried the audiobooks at all? I'm about to do a series of long car rides so I grabbed Forge of Darkness but it's so new that there aren't any reviews up. Reviews for GotM are pretty positive, but this one has a different narrator. I guess I'll see. Oh, and yes I've read all the other books. I'm not starting with Forge.
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Nov 7, 2012 23:38
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Verdigris.
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Nov 7, 2012 23:56
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About 2/3 of the way through the Forge of Darkness audiobook. I just got through the part with Draconus's daughters. I spent about an hour in the car with  on my face. Goddrat that got dark quick.The audiobook is quite good. The narrator does a pretty great job of giving everyone distinctive voices, though some of the accents are sort of grating. All the Azathi are, for some reason, very Scottish. He's good at keeping his inflection in tune with the contents of the text, which gives some real flavor to the pontification. The only real problems I have with the audio are more about hearing the book -- it can be easy to get lost, especially with scene transitions. While reading Erikson, I have a tendency to flip back every now and again to remind myself where we last left a character (or to remind myself who the hell someone is.) Much harder to do with audio. Also, some of the graphic detail is even more unsettling when it's read to you. This book feels more visceral in a lot of places than the rest of Malazan, which is saying something.
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Nov 15, 2012 07:46
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I think the answer depends on what is meant by 'depictions of violence.' I agree that the tone of the violence in Malazan is a little less deliberately sadistic than what GRRM excretes, but the actual descriptions of what's going down can be much worse. Erikson's great at gritty, realistic violence and some of the details of the acts are pretty horrifying. The scale is often different too -- this series has a lot of battles between warring armies / groups, and there are long stretches that are absolutely soaked in blood and viscera and people getting hewn in half. It doesn't feel exploitative, but it IS really drat vivid.
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Jan 10, 2013 04:29
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snoremac posted:I'm looking to get back into this series after abandoning it midway through the second book. Could someone link me to a decent plot summary of the first book so I can get up to speed? I'd search myself but I don't want to stumble on any spoilers. The tor.com ReRead of the Fallen is really great for this sort of stuff. It might be a bit more in-depth than you're looking for, but if you just hit the summaries and then Amanda's comments you'll get everything you need. Bill's comments sometimes have a bit of spoiler for later books so avoid 'em if necessary. They just got to Toll the Hounds after starting in 2010. 
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Apr 17, 2013 |
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Apr 17, 2013 01:15
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Lofty132 posted:I was browsing Amazon for Malazan stuff speculatively and saw there are audiobooks. I was unaware of this. Does anyone know if they are any good? I might look to acquire them as a potential revisit to the series (for a third time, I know!) years down the line. I've only listened to the Forge of Darkness one, which has a different narrator than the rest, but it was really good. It's also 32 hours long, so you really get your money's worth. For some reason he decided that all the Azathani have heavy scottish accents, but at least it sets them apart. He does a decent job of giving all the characters different voices. Listening to Erikson is a different experience because it's much harder to flip back a page or two (or even a few chapters) to remind yourself who a particular character is, and FoD has scads of them. When I read Malazan I often find myself backtracking a little to try to suss out any details I missed, and that's tough when you have to just seek around an audio file. On the other hand, it gives you time to really savor the scene-setting and miscellaneous stuff it can be easy to glaze through when you're reading the book. FoD also has some of the most extreme brutality of any book in the series, so listening to the thing actually made me sort of uncomfortable in a couple places. I got to the part with Draconus's daughters while driving down a deserted road at like 1 AM and wore a face for the next hour or so.E: Just looked up the narrator of the main three books and he's also done narration for like all of the Gor novels.   
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 07:41
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foutre posted:All that said, there's so much ambition and potential here that I can't help but keep reading. I'm a sucker for this kind of book. Four posts above this one: Wolfsheim posted:The OP isn't kidding when it mentions that the writing gets substantially better with every book. The first book was written a decade before the other ones. Book 2 is a pretty big step up and they get better from there. Keep on trucking, it's worth it.
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May 21, 2014 03:33
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Two things - I just started another (third) 're-read' which I put in quotes because this time I'm listening to the audiobooks, and it's pretty nice! I probably wouldn't recommend them to a new reader, but because I already have a slots in my brain to ID all the wor'ds that get thrown around there's no issue following events. Having a different perspective on the text is nice, and it flushes out a lot of detail that I might skim over or not fully process. Beginning of chapter poems are a good example -- they always make my eyes glaze over a little. Only through books one and a half but apparently there's a worse narrator later on. Guess I'll see. Second, uh -- do we know anything about Erikson's sci fi novel coming out in a few months? I just bumped into it on Amazon and had to do a double take. The cover and description make it sound sort of generic as hell but I rather suspect that won't be the case.
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Jul 1, 2014 22:20
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It takes place ten thousand or so years before the main series, and is about what exactly happened to split the Tiste into different races.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:37
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The next book (5, Midnight Tides) introduces an entirely new location and set of characters but things start to converge in the second half of the series. Book 5 is also a lot of people's favorite, so don't let all the new faces annoy you.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:34
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Rarity posted:I've got up to halfway through Gardens of the Moon. I'm liking it well enough but I don't have a clue what's going on. I can't even tell if the characters I like are the characters I'm supposed to like. Already answered, but I want to point out that you should feel free to post about who you ARE rooting for at any given point, plus what you think might happen or IS actually happening.
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Jan 13, 2015 22:46
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Rarity posted:I'm almost at the end of GotM and I understand this feeling. My version has a forward by Erikson saying 'things will not make sense for a while' so I just figured it was ok to not understand things. I kept on reading and focused on the characters and the bits that did make sense and the story slowly came together. I still don't know how Warrens work, I don't really get what the difference is between a Moranth and a Tiste Andii and a T'lan Imass but that doesn't really matter to enjoy what's going. Try not worrying about understanding everything and just roll with it. Just wanna say that these are perfectly normal things to not understand. If you want, I think these are pretty spoiler-safe: Moranth are allies of the Malazan army, indigenous to the Genabackis continent that GoTM takes place mostly on (aside from some stuff at the beginning) who wear bug armor, ride giant flying bugs and figured out how to make explosives. There are different tribes of them, named by color. Tiste Andii are physically similar to classical dark elves. In GoTM they mostly hang out in a big floating mountain fortress thing. They are associated with darkness. T'lan Imass are undead skeleton people that can dissolve into dust to move around and are have pretty ineffable motivations even to people in-universe. They are associated with fire. Warrens get more explained as the series goes on, don't worry about it. Don't worry about any of this really. I just started a friend on this series, and wasn't sure how much of a primer is useful. It's a series where looking at maps actually helps, because stuff like Seven Cities versus Genabackis took me like three books to grok. I think light explanations for peoples and locations are pretty fine most of the time, but even then there's spoiler stuff -- some peoples relate to others in surprising ways and fumbling through the puzzle pieces is one of the reasons why the books are so good to re-read.
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Jan 28, 2015 22:07
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Daric posted:Unfortunately, Forge of Darkness isn't available on Audible. Huh? I'm looking at it in my library right now. Is it a regional thing?
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Sep 29, 2015 01:01
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Yeah, people's thoughts as they read through are the best. Most of the spoilers in here are well tagged and honestly if you accidentally highlight one by mistake there's a pretty reasonable chance you won't be able to make heads or tails of what people are talking about.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:18
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Pegnose Pete posted:I am assuming the complete collection through Amazon, being official and all that, won't have the wonky formatting errors that come with pirated ebooks. What, you don't want to read about the further adventures of Toe the Younger?
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Apr 13, 2016 02:06
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You've been to two main continents so far and one subcontinent which is the really confusing bit. Gardens of the Moon is mostly set in Genebackis, which is across the ocean from Seven Cities. Malazan City is on Malaz Island, which is off the coast of Quon Tali. Quon Tali is a subcontinent separated from Seven Cities, and Seven Cities itself is kind of a flipped Europe -> Asia situation where all the important cities (for our purposes) are clumped on one end. The beginning of Gardens of the Moon with Paran is in First, here's a crop from a larger map because you said no spoilers I guess and it'll give you an idea of the general shape of things:  Malaz is a tiny island in the bottom middle of that picture, off the coast of Quon Tali. You can see it labelled on this one, and you should see some familiar names -- there's the Napan isles, Wickan plains up north, etc:  Then Seven Cities itself. This is just the northeast section of the much bigger continent. Note the Otatral sea + desert on the islands to the north. The chain of dogs stuff takes place through the middle here.  And across the ocean, Genebackis. Only the northern chunk but that's the only important bit so far. Pale where the meat of GoTM begins is just north of lake Azur in the middle, and Darujhistan is on the south of the same lake. The Malazan Empire has already carved out a chunk of the continent up north:  E: You really don't have to worry about many of the specific place names one way or another but I like to have a vague grounding in where all this stuff is happening. NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 05:51
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snoremac posted:first part of House of Chains snoremac posted:Karsa is awesome.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99lyU5N--f8
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Aug 16, 2016 18:52
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Okay, you're fine. We were just worried you thought he was a cool badass dude, which is what some people come away from that section thinking was the point.
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 02:54
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 03:08 |
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Congrats on finishing the one most people say is the worst! Up next is one many people consider the best (though there's plenty of disagreement.) How did you find it overall? It took me a bit to warm up to Erikson's prose and style of only half explaining things a lot of the time, but once I was in I was in for the duration. This thread isn't as careful about spoilers as the Sanderson one, I think in part because so much happens with so many people that a lot of things are hard to spoil because without context much of it is meaningless. There's definitely thing that COULD be spoiled though.
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Feb 29, 2024 23:33
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