Malazan Empire: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Malazan Empire - Malazan Empire

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Malazan Empire Introduction

#1 User is offline   Gabriel Chase 

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Posted 13 February 2014 - 09:23 PM

Hello there, folks. I am a relative newcomer to the Malazan Book of the Fallen. One day, a few weeks ago, I happened to wander into a charity shop and saw a book there called House of Chains. Around a thousand pages, and all for a mere £2. The opening grabbed me immediately, so I bought it.

I ended up reading all of the first part ('book') within. Things grew markedly more complex and confusing with the second part. So I abandoned it, and started from the opening: Gardens of the Moon. Even that felt like I had missed a book somewhere! Nonetheless, I stuck with it and enjoyed it immensely.

I love Erikson's characters, the way he paints them with a few sketched lines here and there, filling in background and exposition as needed instead of spoonfeeding it to us straightaway. So many of the characters are either likeable, or else you can understand their motivation. And those names! Whiskeyjack, Corporal Deadsmell, Mappo Runt, Sulty the Serving Woman, Braven Tooth… They sound so Dickensian, I love it!

I do have one issue with Erikson's writing style: everyone seems to be a pig–dog of some sort! At every opportunity people — both human and non–human, male or female — growl and grunt. Especially grunt. It grates on my nerves to the point I have to shout the line out loud every time I come across one.

Favourite characters so far: Captain Ganoes Paran, Cotillion, Tattersail, Kalam, Crokus, Mappo, Heboric and Duiker.

At the moment I have started book 3: Memories of Ice. I can't wait to see how things pan out.
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#2 User is offline   Kanese S's 

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Posted 13 February 2014 - 10:27 PM

I think "grunt" in this context just means "brief vocal noise that isn't really a word."
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#3 User is offline   Gabriel Chase 

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Posted 13 February 2014 - 11:41 PM

No, oft times they also grunt words. Nonetheless, it doesn’t really irk me now as much as amuse me. I might even compile a whole list from the books I’ve read so far.
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#4 User is offline   Spoilsport Stonny 

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Posted 14 February 2014 - 03:17 PM

Just wait until you meet Gruntle.
Theorizing that one could poop within his own lifetime, Doctor Poopet led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project, known as QUANTUM POOP. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Doctor Poopet, prematurely stepped into the Poop Accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not his own. Fortunately, contact with his own bowels was made through brainwave transmissions, with Al the Poop Observer, who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Doctor Poopet could see and hear. Trapped in the past, Doctor Poopet finds himself pooping from life to life, pooping things right, that once went wrong and hoping each time, that his next poop will be the poop home.
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#5 User is offline   Gabriel Chase 

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Posted 16 February 2014 - 08:16 PM

^ Hahaha, I just did! Posted Image
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#6 User is offline   amphibian 

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Posted 17 February 2014 - 03:08 AM

I started with Memories of Ice and then looped back, so I'm always interested in talking to people who looped back in similar fashion.

What exactly made you put the first book down unfinished and then find the ones before?
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#7 User is offline   Gabriel Chase 

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Posted 17 February 2014 - 06:17 PM

Well, House of Chains is number 4. The whole first section, about Karsa Orlong, is like a completely unrelated novella set in the Malazan Empire (though of course, we later realise it is indeed related). After that, the story comes to characters already set out in the first 3 books, and refer to events and times that I had not read about by missing those books. It felt a little too complicated, so I decided I would ground myself in the context by reading the first 3 books before going back to number 4. I’m glad I’ve done so!
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