I really wouldn't compare the Malazan books to the Black Company novels -- Malazan is far more concerned with epic events of epicness.
The first Malazan book is the weakest of them that I've read, as the author is trying to squeeze more universe-building in than he comfortably can. I've found the others to be reasonably good -- in my category of "every once in a while I'll pick one up and read it". Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and there are things that annoy me enough in most of them to keep me from reading them more than infrequently. Some people really are quite taken by them, though.
Fortunately, they're comparatively self-contained. There are arc plots running through the series, but each book stands alone reasonably (at least of the ones I've read so far), in that I don't have to really remember much of what happened in a previous book to get into the next one.
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The first Malazan book is the weakest of them that I've read, as the author is trying to squeeze more universe-building in than he comfortably can. I've found the others to be reasonably good -- in my category of "every once in a while I'll pick one up and read it". Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and there are things that annoy me enough in most of them to keep me from reading them more than infrequently. Some people really are quite taken by them, though.
Fortunately, they're comparatively self-contained. There are arc plots running through the series, but each book stands alone reasonably (at least of the ones I've read so far), in that I don't have to really remember much of what happened in a previous book to get into the next one.