I am on my MBotF reread, and I got through the mess that was GotM in record time, and spent all of it telling a friend who also loves Erikson that the book is better than I remembered, since it has an excellently readable plot. That it's a mess of incoherent construction is besides the point, and in any case, the Malazan books tend to spiral in and out (simultaneously!) before driving to the end point per novel, so a little lost-ness isn't out of place.

But I have just finished Memories of Ice, and it is, as ever, a wonderful read, coherent, misleading, satisfactory. A full course meal. But it spends so much time tying up GotM's loose ends it might as well be renamed "GotM: the rewrite". Or "GotM: Let me show you that Quick Ben is actually cool and not just manic". In some ways it works because MoI is the definitive "Stop blaming people/yourself and freaking move on and do something constructive!" book, while GotM was... not. But in others, it just reminds me that GotM was a mess. It features cool characters saying things like "Unleash the seven within!" Even He-Man has better lines.

I am so glad I read MoI first and then worked my way backwards, the first time around.