/lit/ - Literature

>>19566072
>>19566009
So I am gonna do a little writeup on why there is a clash about how hard Malazan is to read.
Erikson didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he started, and his gimmick in general is to work with fucktons of hidden information, tease the nature of something early and reveal it three books later. Usually the hidden information is centuries in the past, and very very relevant for whatever is happening currently (an example being the true nature of this mysterious extinct race of whatever that is doing magical bullshit now).
Gardens of the Moon just throws you into this world full of thousands of years of buried, highly relevant history, and puts you on a battlefield where a bunch of sappeurs are trying to blow up the moon. It is not an understatement that Gardens of the Moon violently filters some people, bordering on a 5. Chain of Dogs is already a lot easier to read, as you got a baseline of how Eriksons magic and world ticks, and you get familiar with his style. After that it is definitly a 3, as his difficulty flatlines and you get used to it.
Since this chart is measuring how hard something is to get into, I would argue that the utter insanity that is Gardens of the Moon reserves a spot in 4 for Malazan, but if you are talking about how easy it is to finish Malazan it really is a 3, since only the length is a challenge.