I stopped reading Malazan halfway throug House of Chains, and at this point I don't think the series is for me.
I know a lot of people consider Memories of Ice one of the best fantasy books ever written, but even that one only really worked for me up until the end of the Siege of Capustan. The second half became a slog, and some of the decisions made by characters who are supposedly brilliant commanders/strategists felt incredibly stupid to me.
My biggest problem with the series is probably the characters. There are just so many of them, and the vast majority aren't interesting enough for me to care about. Even the characters I do like often get a relatively tiny amount of page time spread across thousands of pages, so I never build the kind of emotional attachment the books seem to expect from me. When major characters die, my reaction is usually just "oh, okay" rather than actually feeling anything.
Whiskeyjack is probably the clearest example of another issue I have: Erikson often tells me someone is amazing rather than making me feel it through what they actually do. Everyone constantly talks about how brilliant, respected, charismatic, etc. Whiskeyjack is, but I never really understood why he inspires that level of devotion. Even his relationship with his love intrest felt like it happened because the story told me these two were deeply in love rather than because I saw much chemistry developing between them.
The romance in general doesn't work for me. Relationships often seem to appear almost fully formed, and characters start acting like they've found the love of their lives without enough interaction beforehand to make it convincing. I get that it’s not the focus, but why even include it at all?
I also struggle with the military side of the worldbuilding. The books spend enormous amounts of time on armies marching and ordinary soldiers, but this is also a universe where absurdly powerful mages, gods, ascendants and other beings can wipe out huge numbers of people. At some point I start wondering why conventional armies still function the way they do. It sometimes feels like Erikson wants grounded military fantasy and insanely high-powered mythological fantasy at the same time, but for me the two don't always mesh.
That tonal clash is another big problem. One moment I'm reading a fairly gritty soldier story about exhaustion, marching and army life, and the next there's a seven foot tall white haired immortal dragon elf demigod with a magic sword, or dinosaur people with swords attached to their arms. I know the excess is part of Malazan's appeal, but sometimes it feels less mythic to me and more like every cool fantasy idea someone came up with at age twelve was thrown into the same universe.
Death also stopped having much impact because the setting has so many ways around it. Characters die,get reincarnated, get resurrected, enter houses, come back through warrens, or otherwise continue existing. Once that happened enough times, I stopped feeling much tension when somebody "died" because I was never convinced they were actually gone.
The pacing sucks. There are huge stretches where characters are basically just marching somewhere and having conversations. I wouldn't mind that if I loved the dialogue or characters, but I don't find Erikson's dialogue consistently strong enough to carry hundreds of pages of it. A lot of characters also seem to speak in the same philosophical, introspective voice regardless of whether they're soldiers, gods or ancient beings.
And I understand that Malazan deliberately avoids exposition and expects you to figure things out as you go, but after several books I started finding the obscurity more frustrating than rewarding. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether I was confused because something was intentionally mysterious, because I'd forgotten a tiny detail from 1,500 pages ago, or because the book simply hadn't explained it yet.
There's also a power scaling problem for me. The series constantly introduces something as ancient, terrifying and unbelievably powerful, only for an even more ancient and terrifying thing to appear shortly afterward. After a while "this being has existed for 200,000 years and could destroy an army" stopped impressing me because apparently there are fifty other characters like that wandering around.
I don't think the books are badly written, and I can absolutely see why people love them. The scale is enormous, there are some fantastic individual scenes, Capustan was great, and Erikson clearly has a ridiculous amount of imagination. But after three and a half books I realized I was spending far more time waiting for the parts I enjoyed than actually enjoying myself.
