Not to be that guy, but a correction: Uematsu didn't have any involvement with the music for FFX-2. "1000 Words" was written by Kazushige Nojima, Noriko Matsueda, and Takahito Eguchi (thanks, Final Fantasy Wiki.)

"Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec" is the name (and sole lyric) of another track from FFVIII. The title is an anagram of the phrase "succession of witches" combined with the word "love."

I enjoy Erikson's writing, plotting, and world-building, but the one thing that bugs me about this series is that he doesn't seem to believe in recap. This is a series that has SO much going on that if you're reading the books as they come out, or reading them months apart for any other reason, you're going to have a damned hard time remembering all the salient details. Recap needn't even be in the main text--a separate section as done by Tolkien, or Tad Williams, or indeed Brandon Sanderson would work fine. In TV, there's a saying that some shows are "better on DVD"--when you can watch them at a pace of more than one episode per week, heavily serialized shows hang together a lot better because it all stays fresher in your mind. I think this series is the book equivalent, and I do think it's worth the effort, but I had to stop midway through book 8 because I just couldn't remember who everyone was and what they were doing.

This will be and already is a popular choice, but it's the Cleansing for me. 3,000 years of animosity and distrust between male and female channelers--which seems to have filtered through to the rest of society in a reduced form--starts to heal right there. A theme of the series that I don't see mentioned often is that the "battle of the sexes" is turned up to 11 in Randland, and it probably all stems from the Time of Madness. And it was long clear that lack of cooperation between male and female channelers, standing in for men and women in general, would doom the whole world. The Cleansing is a big deal in the story for that reason, too.

Storm Leaders, Tower Guards... will next year bring us Children of the Light?