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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Majestic and oh so tantalizing, October 1, 2009
When i saw that this book was coming out 6 months earlier in the UK than the US, I called my brother in Ireland and told him to pick it up there and send it on to me ASAP. It arrived 5 days ago, and at almost 900 pages it was just a joy to behold. I managed to finish it in 4 days and the reson it took so long ;) was that I just wanted to savor it as much as possible, especially after the foreword warning about cliff hangers. And let me say up front, this book has some nail-biting cliff-hangers! I absolutely love this series! Sure, it is difficult to follow sometimes and frequent trips to previous volumes are required to jolt the memory of this character and that event (in fact, i am now re-reading Toll the Hounds just to make sense of some things I read in DoD). But the way SE can bring all these disparate story lines together still amazes me. As I alrady mentioned, this book is a hefty tome, 900 pages of battles, philosophy, plots and betrayals, and I was captivated from the first chapter. Characters that were distant memories suddenly returned, and the story arc of the K'Chain Che Malle was amazing and left me questioning many of my preconceptions. There is a lot of philosophical banter among the characters, but this is a hallmark of SE and I have come to appreciate some of the gems he manages to introduce. It's hard to say much more about this book without adding spoilers, and I don't want to do that. But suffice to say that this book is everything I hoped for and I await with bated breath for the conclusion of one of the best fantasy series of all time.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A treatise on death and suspense...oh - and war too, I suppose, September 9, 2009
Book 9 of 10 in Steven Erikson's acclaimed Malazon Book of the Fallen starts out with a caveat. This is NOT a complete story arc. Be WARNED! With that, it was excellent with a much different feel than some of the previous books. The beginning shot off like a canon - you felt blurred and a bit confused dealing with all new characters in all new settings. During the bulk of the reading however, it dealt with many more mundane side stories and was a little more "boring" than previous books. (see caveat above). The characters muttered and muddled about talking about death and war and peace and had little soap operas about this and that. You saw people you never expected to see again and they did unexpected things. Then there was a horrific violent scene or 3 that set the dark tone. Then the convergence. Which in previous books had lots of death and violence and gods and ascendents. This one did too, I suppose. But it almost happened as an accident. And worst of all - you don't really know who died! No resolution for us, dear reader. Well, not much really - just more questions. If you hate cliffhangers - you really might want to wait till the second half of the book (The Crippled God - Book 10) comes out. After all, you have spent up to a week of your life reading this series, don't wreck it now! If you can't wait, read it slowly and digest thoroughly.
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23 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Losing the thread, February 26, 2010
I'm a long time fan of this series, and still consider Deadhouse Gates to be one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read. But the downward trend in characterization, coherence, and common sense that has become increasingly obvious the last few books has really become too much in Dust of Dreams. It's boring. I found I had to skip ahead vast amounts, usually in vain, to find some action to grab my interest, some attempt at humor that was actually funny, or some explanation of why I should care about yet more new characters inexplicably introduced in the ninth book of a ten book series. It's pointlessly depressing. In past books, characters we cared about often had bad things happen to them for reasons tragic, ironic, or at least serving the plot. Those made me choke up, made me care, and sometimes made me righteously angry at other characters in the book. Good stuff. Here we have a lot of death that seems purely random and serving no purpose at all. Did anyone at all care about the Barghast after their only significant appearance in the third book? Of course not. Was anyone calling out for their reappearance in book nine? Endless pages describing stupid internal squabbles? Their ultimate fate, and the simply disgusting treatment of Hetan? I kept hoping to find something to tie this inexplicable interlude into the larger plot involving the Malazan 14th Army or the machinations of various gods and others, but it's not there. I can only guess Erikson couldn't get an S&M novella about primitive tribal cultures published independently and folded it into Dust of Dreams as some sort of misguided form of "artistic" expression. It's not well integrated into the overall story. New characters/nations/factions, most of whom are boring and pointless even here and can't possibly be necessary to the completion of the series in the next book; "new" supposedly extinct races, for the 193rd time, with no foreshadowing whatsoever in previous books; and random flailing around by those actors we did know about from prior efforts in the series. I have no doubt whatsoever that I could write a two page synopsis of the events in this book that would enable one to transition smoothly from book 8 to book 10. No one's motivations make sense. In the middle of this series I developed a strong distaste for the philosophizing that was overly dramatic and masturbatory to aspire to the title "sophomoric," but this books makes me wish it would come back - then at least I'd have some explanation for why anyone would choose to do the things they do in this book, and, even less explicably, why others follow them. (I'm looking at you, Bonehunters.) This is not the worst book in the world, but it is the worst book in this series so far, a title I sincerely hope it retains after the release of book 10. This series has overall been interesting and sometimes extraordinary. If you've been a fan before, you should still read this book. Just don't feel the need to take it too seriously or read it all. Skimming will lesson your pain considerably.
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