Personally there is no contest for me - Earthsea wins hands down.
Short, quick reads - simple but very deep. Elegantly written by a master. I have problems with
Tehanu, but that is only the one book out of the entire series I had problems with.
I thought the first Malazan book was fairly poorly written (that would be
Gardens of the Moon), but is
is a first novel and was written many years before he continued the story. For me the highlight of the series was the second book, but I really liked everything up to
Midnight Tides.
That is when the padding started. Half of that book could have easily been cut with no loss. And when you are talking about a book that is pushing 1000 pages...
And while I liked
The Bonehunters more than MT, there was this...how shall I put it? At that point the author's insistance on making everything and everyone more and more badass than everything and everyone else really started turning me off. I like badass characters, but
The Bonehunters (especially the ending) just took that so far that it jarred me right of the book and made me laugh at something that was not intended to be funny.
Erikson can be great to read - but he desperately needs a good editor!! Someone to drastically cut out some of the padding in the later books - and to tell him "enough is enough. Tone this crap down!"
Malazan could have been an all time classic fantasy series with a great editor, but right now I view it as a mediocre series with some awesome high points and having hundreds of pages of boring useless drivel for its low points.
I greatly prefer R. Scott Bakker to Erikson at the moment...I would recommend his
Prince of Nothing trilogy highly over Malazan.
But again, this is all personal preference. I know I would be flamed and killed at many boards were I to diss Erikson as I just did.