One weird thing about the series is that the first book, Gardens of the Moon, is quite an outlier in style (a lot of implied stuff that is not the easiest to follow when book 1 is usually where the author spells stuff out about their world) and seems to switch a lot of people off. I really like it as it goes and wish he had retained more of the style , but he reverts to a more conventional approach almost immediately in book 2. Maybe his editor had a word - the series was a real slow burner that quietly built a following here in the UK before finally taking off in the US (Erikson is Canadian).