He's no Faulkner, Welty, Agee, or O'Connor, but there are times in his writing at a sentence level where it seems he tried to make a sentence/description do as much as the ones I mentioned above often achieved with their fictions. I just think he failed more often than he succeeded, but the style certainly is something a bit antiquated to me, not that I'm not used to more ornate prose (or attempts at such)






I agree. And now I find myself thinking of that mechanical owl battling Sam Worthington. Thanks?




Save FoD for last. There's an event in Orb Sceptre Throne that I think would be more mysterious if read first than after a similar event is described in FoD. Other than that, FoD would spoil little for the two Esslemont books.




Indeed.




I don't know if "passive" is an entirely suitable word for this, although I see what you're getting at in terms of the story arcs being those to be discovered rather anticipated. I think what Malazan readers (or rather, re-readers) can do is piece together the evidence after the fact and draw conclusions based on some of the themes the two are exploring.



Yes. Problem I run into is that I try to be simultaneously a "smart" and "dumb" reader. I like to figure out some possibilities while reading, but I don't want to dwell on anticipating future developments when reading, because I am more concerned with how discoveries are presented rather than guessing at what revelations there will be. So for me, as WoT advanced, I felt that there were more and more longeurs in the various story arcs, things that became very difficult to avoid once the arcs began to incorporate more and more elements (political, intrigue, etc.) in addition to a core quest/prophecy element. It's an issue I have with quite a few multivolume epic fantasies, that sense of "mission creep" that weakens the narrative at times in order to incorporate more within the pages.




Yes, it's the historico-anthropological "layers" that captured my attention by the beginning of MoI. I can see where for some it might get to be a bit much by series' end, but for me, it's the questions revolving around faith, belief, structures (wanderings–>holds–>warrens), and the effects of violence upon humans that have held my interest throughout. It feels more thought out than what I have encountered before in epic fantasies (not that I have read a great many of those).



Let's not forget that for Malazan, the fans who thought the Crippled God would be the focal point of the series might have overwhelmed to see the Tiste issue arise in the late volumes (FoD introduces some bombshells in regards to that, although passages in TtH and DoD do hint along those lines) and the Esslemont volumes confused the issue some more for those who wanted a more linear plot progression. When I first read those late volumes, I liked the thematic/prose elements, but wondered if focus had been lost. Now I'm suspecting that the story is purposely left open-ended, not just for the presumed "main" element, but for the Tiste co-plot and the "barbaric" Karsa one. That possible non-"end game" may dissuade many who loved the Chain of Dogs or the Battle of Coral from loving the clash in TtH or the revelations of DoD or TCG.

As for WoT, I think its prose and characterizations are too weak for it to achieve Jordan's ambitions for it, but I started reading it 15 years ago, when I actually read CoS first (thinking it was a series of stand-alones for some reason) and understood just enough to decide 1-6 would be worth buying, even with my grad student budget at the time. The succeeding volumes just felt more like the series got buried under the weight of its side elements, to the obscuration of its presumed thematic core.