Should I keep reading Malazan?

Spoilers for Gardens of the moon in this post.

Hello everyone! I just finished Gardens of the moon and I’m not sure if I should keep reading the series.

I think the world is very creative and has a lot of things I’ve never seen before. It feels really complex and well thought-out. With a lot of cool history, mythology, different races, magic creatures, etc. And I liked that a lot.

At first it’s a bit hard to keep up with all the different characters and plot lines and once you start getting the hang of it you switch to a completely different location with it’s own set of new characters and you have to again start figuring out who they are, what they want and how do each of them fit into the larger picture.

For this I found the book a bit hard to get through and like chore sometimes. By the end, while I’m sure I was missing a lot of things, I think I had a good understanding of who the mayor players were in this story and what their goals were and was excited to see how everything came together.

I was a bit disappointed in a lot of the resolutions to the different plot lines. A lot of things felt to me like deus ex machina. Like, a new magic thing never before mentioned or explained was used to solve the problems, when Crokus is about to be killed some new people come out of nowhere to save him because he’s the “coin bearer”, or the one that in my opinion was the worst, when Baruk is fighting this assassin witch that just killed a Tiste andii that he says is more powerful than him gets defeated by Crokus… with a brick… who then does the cringiest thing flipping the coin and saying it was luck.

I get that it has to do with oppon and him being the coin bearer and all but that felt super cheesy and it had me actually rolling my eyes. I think I find it a lot more rewarding when we see a character overcome a challenge using their wit, ability or previously established powers. Which didn’t happen at all in this book.

I did enjoy the Anomander Rake fight, probably because I really like that character. But it was kind of obvious what the outcome of that was going to be.

All in all, I enjoyed some parts but didn’t really feel connected to the characters or the story and felt the ending was a bit underwhelming.

Does this get better in the later books? Is it worth to keep reading the series? I’ve seen a lot of people saying it gets good by book 3 or 4 but I’m not sure if it’s worth it if it takes that long to be good. All opinions are appreciated!

TLDR: I enjoyed some parts of Gardens of the moon, mainly the woldbuilding, but didn’t feel connected to the characters or story and found the ending underwhelming. Should I continue the series?