Wow. It’s mid-March and I’ve only read three books. Maybe I should have picked slimmer novels. I feel like I’m behind on my target, even though I’ve not really set any targets.
The reason I’m so far “behind” is that Reaper’s Gale by Steven Erikson is an immense book of over 900 pages. And, unfortunately, it seemed every page of 900. It didn’t fly by, really. I think over the past couple of years that I’ve been more used to an influx of shorter novels that were stylistically very different. So having to read a book that was essentially nearly 3 novels of the length I have been reading, or at least two, I felt like I was growing a bit bored with the setting. This is perhaps a bit unfair to Erikson, who did nothing wrong in his genre of Big Fat Fantasy, but usually his Big and Fat equated to 600 pages and the extra 300 pages of word-blubber was a strain on me.
That griping having been said, I would like to mention that Erikson is one of the best at swiftly painting a fantasy setting with a few brush strokes as possible. I quite like the fantasy setting he’s created. I must say at this point that this is the seventh book in the A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Each book is heavily dependent on having read the series and as I’ve read them as they’ve come out, I can’t remember much of the previous novels. I hardly ever re-read books. There are some exceptions, but for the most part the fun for me is in the surprise of the new and not the snuggly-comfort of the familiar.
I like Erikson’s style. Just enough description of people and surroundings without descending into Jordan-esque pointless wordiness. I’ve been very impressed by his world ideas, but then again his characters tend to run together. He has so many characters, you see, and so many of them are created just to die in 50 pages. In each book he must add 50+ characters to his narrative. And over seven books, it’s impossible to keep track of many of them.
Score: 66/100
Book I am Reading Now: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
*I have read the Lord Of The Rings before, but I’m making an exception to my rule of re-reading for these books*