Well, I got Dust of Dreams (From S. Erikson) as soon as it got out (I don’t remember the exact date, but it was probably one year ago – around the same time Cornwell got out his last book).

Since that time, I’ve managed to read the Cornwell, 4 Sanderson, the WOT book, and I think some more.

Each time, I got the book up, I read it for some time and had to put it down. You could ask yourselves why?

Erikson’s books are always difficult for me to read (at least for me) : they are poetic (and I am quite dense to poetry), often cryptic and slow paced. This one is all of that, plus it’s huge! It’s 900 pages long and let me tell you, in a hardcover, that’s quite some weight. I bought myself a Kindle because of this book and the impossibility to carry it around.

Yet, the WOT book must have weighted about the same (probably a little less, but not significantly less) and I had it done under a week.

So, it must be the writing that kept me back from this book.

I’ll start with the good news : the last 100 pages are fantastic and those, I read in 2 days. This is quite a great ending. Well, it felt like so much like an ending that despite the fact that there is still one last book to come, it could very well have been the last.

The bad news : there are 800 pages before those last 100 and those are quite slow. I know, the trouble with Erikson is that he has like a hundred threads going in like 3 different places (often continents, though that’s not the case in that particular book) and that you’re bound to like some threads more than others. When you’re in a thread you don’t like, you feel like you’re walking in the mud (more like half of your body is in the mud) and that’s a slow read.

The trouble here is that I only liked one of the 5 or 6 threads here – the malazans. I would have liked to see more of the Letherii, but that part doesn’t continue after the first chapters – shame that. So, I’m left with one story I like and 5 I like a lot less. I didn’t care about the Barghast (though I will concede that even if I wasn’t interested, that part was quite fascinating on a sociological point of view). I cared even less about the trail of childrens going through the desert. I didn’t care about the grey helms or the K’Chain Che’malle either.

That’s a lot of things I didn’t care about for one book. Had this been the first of the series, I’m sure I would have put back the book on the shelf and never bought another one. I had loved the preceding one (despite how it ended) and now, I’m left with 1/9 of a very good book and 8/9 that left me feeling like the author was doing his thing on his corner and had left me out of it. Ok, I may be a little hard here, the start is not bad. I’ll round it up at 1/4 good, 3/4 lost me.

To end things, if someone could explain to me where Icarium came out from at the end of the book, I’d like to understand that. The character has not been seen for the entire book and pops into the action, saving the day. Looks like Deus Ex Machina to me…

Time to pass to another book, if ever Amazon decides to let me download one I like, but that’s another story…