The first hundred pages are a village, a festival, and some very bad news arriving on horseback. The remaining thirteen thousand are what happens when nobody in that village is allowed to go home again. It is a great deal of book, and I want to be honest about the cost before I recommend it.
What the length buys you is weather. Not the metaphorical kind — actual seasons, actual roads, actual distances that take actual weeks. Most epics compress travel because travel is boring. This one refuses, and the refusal is the whole trick: by the time the world turns dangerous you have walked enough of it to mind.
What it costs you
The famous complaints are all true. There is a stretch in the middle where the plot sits down for a rest and does not get up for two volumes. Characters tug at their own braids often enough that you could set a clock by it, and the men and women of this world spend a remarkable amount of energy being baffled by one another. If any of that will end you, this is not your series and no amount of arguing from me will change it.
I will not pretend I read the slow stretch attentively. I read it the way you walk a familiar road in the rain — head down, moving, trusting there is a house at the end.
The test of a long book is not whether every page earns its place. It is whether the last page makes you forgive the ones that didn't.— The Editor
What it buys you
The ending pays. Not in the tidy way — in the way where a thing planted in the second chapter comes due four thousand pages later and you have to put the book down and go stand outside for a minute. I have read few finishes that earned themselves so thoroughly, and none that needed so much road to get there.
There is also the matter of the ensemble. Somewhere around the fourth volume you stop reading for the plot and start reading because you would like to know how these particular people are getting on. That is not a small thing for a book to manage, and it is the reason the long middle survives at all.
How to actually do it
Read the first book on its own terms and decide there. It is the most conventional of the fourteen and the least representative, which is an awkward combination, but it is a fair sample of the prose and the pacing. If book one bores you, the series will not rescue you. If book one merely feels familiar, keep going — the familiarity is deliberate and it goes away.
Do not marathon it. One volume, then something short and unrelated, then the next. The people who bounce off this series hardest are almost always the ones who tried to take it in one run.