One of the biggest problems with massive multi-book arcs is that, if you read them as they are published, you have to wait a long time between installments. In this case, it was nearly two years between books, and although I thoroughly enjoyed Ilium, I read nearly 100 books between the day I finished it and the publication date of its followup Olympos.

My opinion of Olympos suffers greatly as a result. I had lost my familiarity with the characters and the setting, and I found that in the second installment, I was never able to care much about the characters or the massively complicated web they inhabit. It took me more than two weeks to read the first 300 pages, in part because I was bored enough to put it down midway and read Harry Potter instead.

At any rate, I can report that the many loose ends at the end of Ilium are tied up in Olympos, but I don't have much else to say. Olympos is almost certainly a better book than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm massively disappointed in one of my favorite authors, and I'm going to be a lot more careful in the future to avoid starting multi-book series until they've all been published.