Three and a half million words later...

Last night I finished book 10 of 10 in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Have you ever had a friend recommend a great book, only to learn that it is part of a larger series? It's nice to be hooked on a series, but I didn't realize the three year ride I was in for with this one. It is best described as an epic science fiction/fantasy series spun out of a role playing game.

Three years ago, I started "Gardens of the Moon." It was a paperback, and only a few hundred pages. Not too intimidating. The first five books each focus on a single conflict that is resolved by the end of the book. In the last five, the story is leading up to a final conflict in book 10 "The Crippled God". The author also increases the length of the books to roughly 1000 pages each. I read the first seven one right after another. The next three were published one year at a time. If I were to read these again, it would be all 10 in a row to keep up with the most complex plot and set of characters I've ever seen in a book series. Take a look at this list of Dramatis Personae to see what I mean.

It wasn't part of an official book club, but I read the first seven books at the same time as two friends. This kept me on my toes since they had read it previously and would quiz me on things from the books. One of my main questions throughout was why the author called the series "A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen." The Malazan army is one of the main sets of characters, but not the only one of importance. Finally, in book 10 I found a passage with an explanation. "In that Malazan Book of the Fallen, the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Crippled God. As something...fitting. And for our seeming fanaticism they will dismiss all that we were, and thing only of what we achieved. Or failed to achieve. And in so doing, they will miss the whole point." Later on in the book, the Adjunct (leader) of the army talks about being "unwitnessed." Her point was that for the most part, individuals of an army aren't called out in the history books, just the final win or loss outcome. In this series, we see the detailed lives of many soldiers and citizens during their military conflicts.

The overall tone of the series is very serious, and can be a downer with so much of the focus on war and death. However, the author let's his sense of humor through in several ways. One way is in the character names and how they reflect the nature of the character. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Lady Envy and her sister Lady Spite
• Mudslinger
• Sweetest Sufferance
• Rumjugs and Sweetlard
• Vastly Blank

As the last point I want to make, the author is very descriptive and I learned a few new words along the way. Here are several that kept coming up during the series:

• Gelid - very cold, icy.
• Lambent - glowing, gleaming, flickering. As in "the lambent eyes of the tiger god of war"
• Hoary - gray or white as with old age. One of the favorite curses in the book was "Hood's hoary balls." Hood was the god of death.