The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Nov16 by Kinsey

I loved The Magicians. As I said in an earlier entry, I had not been interested in reading it and knew basically nothing about it when I started, but I was sucked in within a few pages and read like a madwoman until I finished. It was engaging and full of magic and fantasy, but also felt grounded and modern. Calling it Harry Potter Says Motherfucker is really quite a good summary.

I don’t want to go into many details, because I went into the book blind and really enjoyed seeing things unfold, but it’s a very Harry Potter-like set up: a normal teenage boy discovers there is magic in the world and enters a magical boarding school. However, it differs from Harry Potter in some significant ways. First, it is an adult book and there is a fair bit of sex and drugs and violence. Second, things are far less cute than at Hogwarts; learning magic is presented as a real slog, like trying memorize endless complicated multiplication tables, and it’s made very clear that magic can’t fix everything and can’t make someone happy. And third, Grossman doesn’t let things end at graduation, so there’s a real exploration of leaving school and transitioning to the “real world.”

The other thing I really liked about the book was that for me the tone and the writing fell somewhere in between young adult and adult. I worry that this sounds like a criticism, and it’s not. It’s just that as much as I love (LOVE) young adult fantasy books, they tend to be somewhat heavy on the fantasy/moral lesson side of things (Narnia, Robin McKinley, Harry Potter himself). Adult fantasy books, on the other hand, are often so dark that the wonder of magic seems tamped down by the MISERY and UNENDING PAIN OF EXISTENCE. The authors that come to mind here are China Mieville and Octavia Butler; I like both those authors, but when I finish one of their books I generally feel the need for a stiff drink and some restorative episodes of How I Met Your Mother. The Magicians does a nice job of balancing the idea that parts of life are sad and miserable but other parts (including magic) are awesome. It also uses a traditional YA template (magical boarding school, parents who don’t understand, real evil in the world) to talk about the kind of adult issues that come up in every hipster literary novel: “Why do I do such stupid stuff sometimes? What am I doing with my life? What does it really mean to be an adult?”

Abigail Nussbaum, who I mentioned last week, hated this book. I don’t personally agree with her take–she seems to ascribe a lot of socio-economic and religious themes to what I read as primarily a coming-of-age story–but she makes some really interesting points. (Note that her review includes a lot of plot details, so you may want to wait to read it until after you’ve finished the book.)

And finally, while doing some Amazon research for this, I stumbled upon the page for The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is fairly recent children’s chapter book about a china rabbit that made me cry and cry. You think The Velveteen Rabbit is touching? That rabbit’s got nothing on Edward. This book is too much for me to ever read again, but everyone else should–it’s a surprisingly layered story about love and ego and heartbreak and personal growth. It’s got nothing to do with The Magicians, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was out there.

Links, plus why I should start listening to people

Nov1 by Kinsey

I’m not going to review anything right now, because the only book I can think about–one of the only things I can think about at all–is The Magicians by Lev Grossman and I’m not done with it yet. This is one of those books that I kept hearing was good, and hearing people rave about, but for some reason it just didn’t appeal to me. I don’t know if was the title, or the dull cover, or what, but any time I saw the book mentioned I had an overwhelming reaction of “Meh.”

That was really dumb. This book is awesome. So far it’s funny and smart and has magic and a boarding school and has me completely invested in and supportive of a teenage boy protagonist. (I often find teenage boys to be such a different species from me that I have trouble with stories told from their perspective.)

So while I’m off racing through The Magicians, I recommend checking out these two links.

Minimalist Posters for Your Favorite Children’s Stories are just awesome. If every wall of my apartment wasn’t already covered with cool things I found on the Internet, I would buy the Little Red Riding Hood one to put in my bedroom and creep me out.

Better Book Titles reimagines the covers of classic books with more direct titles. So The Great Gatsby is now Drink Responsibly, while Strunk and White becomes Correct Your Friends Like a Dick. Really funny.

I also just noticed tht Better Book Titles says that The Magicians should be called Harry Potter Says “Motherfucker.” If I’d known that I might have read it ages ago.

The Leftovers

Oct25 by Kinsey

In my last post I talked a bit about how hard it can be to find books that have elements of fantasy of science fiction, but are not cheesy genre fiction. By all accounts, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers should be exactly my kind of book. Perrotta is a well-respected literary author probably most famous for Little Children, which was made into a move with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. (Topic for another day: while I liked Little Children, as far as I can tell, the only reason it wasn’t classified as chick lit is that it was written by a man. Had the author been named Tara Perrotta, I bet you money that thing would have had a pink cover. Possibly featuring shoes.) In The Leftovers, Perrotta is still focused on normal, middle American families, but he’s put a slightly supernatural spin on this time. Several years before the events of the book take place, a significant number of the earth’s population disappeared—vanished in an instant. While many people assume this was the Rapture, plenty of non-Christians disappeared as well, and nothing has happened since that day to provide any additional information.

It’s an intriguing concept and I was interested in reading a book that deals with a Rapture-like event without being overbearingly religious (in other words, not the Left Behind books). And the book does an excellent job of portraying what might really happen in this situation. Some people assume the world is ending and turn to religious cults, some lose their faith entirely, and some do their best to move forward and not think about it too much. (I would definitely be in that last category.)

But the thing is, this book really isn’t about the disappearance. It’s about normal, middle-class American families in a small town: people get together, people break up, a teenager makes a friend who might not be a good influence. Okay, there is a very creepy Doomsday cult involved, but even that comes off less as science fiction and more like a plot line about someone joining a strict new church. And the characters, even the ones in the cult, don’t even discuss the disappearance much at all. The Rapture wasn’t even necessary—using another significant disaster or trauma wouldn’t have caused that many changes in the book.

Perrotta is known for his detailed descriptions of emotional turmoil under the surface of normal life, and the book definitely does that well. I would have no issues recommending the book to someone like my sister, who hates science fiction books and doesn’t read them at all. But for me, there was a lot less supernatural excitement than I was expecting or hoping for. On the continuum of realistic to fantastical, The Leftovers falls too much on the everyday-life side of things for me.

A Discovery of Witches

Oct18 by Kinsey

This is not exactly my proudest admission, but the number one place I get my book recommendations is the Entertainment Weekly Books section. It may not be the New York Review of Books, but EW’s book section tends to include a good mix of literary fiction, genre fiction, and nonfiction, and the reviews generally manage to assess the book without giving away the whole plot. They also tend to be pretty stringent with their grading–they have no issues giving C or D grades to big names or wildly-praised books such as Run by Ann Patchett or Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. Which is why I was excited to read their review of A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. EW gave it a B+ and the review made is sound like a solid, well-written book with believable characters that just happened to feature witches and vampires–in other words, exactly the sort of urban fanstay based in the modern-day world that I love. I knew going in that it wasn’t Faulkner, but I had high hopes that I might have found another genre book that incorporates the supernatural while not being trashy or badly written. Which is why I was a little dismayed to realize that it was basically Twilight for grown-ups.

Without giving too much away, the basic plot is that witches, vampires, and daemons are all real, but they live fairly normal lives alongside oblivious humans. (Side note: is it just me, or did the His Dark Materials series pretty much take over that spelling of daemon?) Diana is witch, part of powerful and famous witch family, who is trying to distance herself from her powers by living a quiet life as a graduate student at Oxford. Then she accidentally does something that attracts the attention of the supernatural community, she meets a dangerous yet irresistible vampire named Matthew, and her whole life starts racing away into adventure, danger, romance, etc.

Here are my three main issues with this book:

1) The lead character falls totally, immediately, and completely in love with a vampire, despite his vampiric nature, in exactly the same way Bella does in Twilight. In an adolescent this is annoying, but somewhat understandable and forgivable. In a grown-ass woman, it just seems like bad decision making.

2) The book is 592 pages long and it ends on a cliff hanger. After I read the book I learned that it’s the first in a planned trilogy. Look, I love a good book series, but I also pretty firmly believe that individual books should stand alone. Sure, plot threads may carry from one book to another, but it makes me grumpy when a book just stops in the middle of things. I like to think of a book as an entity both physically and in terms of the story telling. If the author can’t figure out how to make a single book at least somewhat satisfying and functional in and of itself, I start losing trust in them. (See also: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis.)

3) The witches and vampires and daemons in Oxford all go to a special hot yoga class together. HOT YOGA.

Don’t get me wrong, I read it and enjoyed most of it and it was definitely better written than Twilight. I suspect I’ll read the next one, if only to figure out what happens next since there was certainly no closure in this book. And there were some lovely parts–Diana’s family has a haunted house that is both creepy and considerate (creating new rooms when company is coming), and the descriptions of Oxford make me want to book a trip there–but I just feel like I need to warn other people who might be looking for more literary fantasy. Twilight for grown-ups.

But I hear good things about the new Colson Whitehead zombie book Zone One. His book The Intuitionist managed to be beautiful and heart-breaking and thrilling while describing an alternate reality in which elevators are glorified, so right now he’s got my trust. (Yes, elevators. And it’s about racism. It’s great.)

The Wilder Life

Oct6 by Kinsey

Early in The Wilder Life Wendy McClure explains that there are two kinds of Little House on the Prairie people: people who loved the books, and people who loved the TV show. If you’re a Michael Landon/Melissa Gilbert/70s TV fan, you can really stop reading right now. I am a book person and so is Wendy McClure. But she took it a step further, diving into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing as an adult and making it her own personal project to do whatever she could to get to what she calls “Laura world.”

In addition to rereading all the books, McClure buys a butter churn and makes butter in her Chicago apartment. She reads the (surprisingly extensive) academic research on the Ingalls family and checks out the online homeschooling communities that use the books in their teaching. And then she starts travelling around the Midwest, to Wisconsin and South Dakota and Missouri, making a pilgrimage to the places Wilder lived. She drags her boyfriend into this all, as well, and basically allows her modern urban life to be temporarily subsumed by her obsession with Little House on the Prairie. (Not that she abandons modern life entirely: McClure occasionally Tweets as Laura at http://twitter.com/#!/halfpintingalls. My recent favorite: “Pa wants to leave Facebook because he says we have too many neighbors now! And, truth be told, he never had much luck playing Farmville.”)

Are you wondering whether stories of urban butter churning are enough to build a book on? Yeah, probably not. The book mostly reads like memories of scenes from the books, interspersed with stories of driving across South Dakota.You learn a little about Wilder’s life and how it differed from the books, but it’s not a history or biography of the family. McClure’s road trip stories, especially one that involves an accidental camping trip with a cult, are funny and sharp, but it’s not a travel book. And while there is a brief discussion in the book about how McClure was, at least partially, using the books to deal with the loss of her mother, that’s mentioned only in passing. It’s an entertaining, fun read–McClure’s writing is very engaging–but it feels more like stories you would tell your friends over drinks than like a fully-formed narrative memoir.

But I don’t mean to make that out as a bad thing, necessarily. It’s like this: a few years ago I saw a stage production of Little Women in London that was awful. Each actor failed at an American accent in his or her own distinct way. They’d mucked around with the timeline and added a bunch of forgettable songs. At one point an actor in a white dress actually played the ghost of Beth. (However, to go on a brief tangent, somehow this terrible production managed to fix the one thing I never liked about Little Women–Professor Bhaer. In the book he seemed so old and serious that it felt like Jo totally settled, but in this show he was played as young and adorably goofy, sort of like Marshall on How I Met Your Mother. That whole relationship finally made sense to me.) But I still enjoyed myself, because I read Little Women so many times when I was little that it was like watching a reenactment of my own childhood. I could tell from the conversations around me that the Brits in the audience weren’t familiar with the book and that the show was not connecting with most of them. But at each new scene I would be bouncing in my seat, “It’s Amy and the limes! It’s the piano!” The Wilder Life made me feel the same way. While the action sort of meanders along, reading McClure talk about Laura and Mary and the Long Winter and the dugout house was like having a conversation with a smart friend about our childhoods. If you didn’t love the Little House books as a child, or if you want a tight, plot-driven story, this book isn’t for you. But if you can remember exactly what Laura got for Christmas, or what Almanzo ate in Farmer Boy, or that you should stay out of creeks because there might be leeches in there for God’s sake, The Wilder Life might warm your heart just a little bit.

Our Tragic Universe

Oct3 by Kinsey

Scarlett Thomas wrote PopCo, a fascinating book that I loved and have given to loads of people as a gift. It is full of intricate dialogue and detail, but a mystery at the heart of the story constantly drives the plot forward. However, her follow-up book, The End of Mr. Y, felt like chore to read. It consisted of page after page of characters talking about possibilities and consciousness and reality. I kept losing interest and skimming over huge sections of philosophical musings in an effort to figure out when something would actually happen. So I was dubious when a friend loaned me Thomas’s latest, Our Tragic Universe to read while at the beach this summer. I can handle some musings on the nature of the universe when it’s cold and gray outside, but not when I’m relaxing in a beach chair. But I really enjoyed Our Tragic Universe, not because Thomas returned to a more plot-driven format, but because she fully committed to “the storyless story.”

The plot of the book, such as it is, centers on a young woman living with her (completely useless and aggravating) boyfriend in a small town on the English coast. She spends her time writing genre books, avoiding working on the serious novel she wants to write, and thinking about various New Age-y, self help-y concepts. Things meander along for a while, with various characters having conversations and eating meals and occasionally making decisions about where to live or what job to take or whether to have lunch with someone or not.

There’s no grand dramatic arc. There’s no great rise and fall of action. I was at least 200 pages in before I realized that the tragedy or accident or other major incident I was bracing myself for was never coming. Reading the book was remarkably like listening in on the day-to-day activities of some very smart, thoughtful people who occasionally make some dumb decisions. And while this is not typically the kind of thing I would enjoy—in general, I say that if you can make things up you should go ahead and make up some excitement and some closure—Thomas writes about her characters with such detail and such care that I was completely drawn in. Our Tragic Universe treats the minutia of its characters’ lives with the same respect that we treat the details of our own lives.

The Anastasia series by Lois Lowry

Sep28 by Kinsey

When Anna suggested that we each write something for Banned Books Week, she sent me to the ALA site that lists the most-frequently challenged books. Those lists are topped by the expected things (Harry Potter, Judy Blume, etc.) but number 75 on the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009 shocked me: the Anastasia series by Lois Lowry. I LOVE Anastasia Krupnik! I wanted to BE Anastasia Krumpnik! How could anyone object to Anastasia! I could not remember a single thing about any Anastasia book that I could imagine anyone objecting to. But it had been quite a while since I had read them so, while I didn’t have time to reread all six of the Anastasia books that I own, I did pull them all out and glance through them. (This was harder than it should have been, since a couple of years ago I followed an Internet trend and arranged all the books in my bookcase by color. People always ask me if it makes it hard to find my books and I always say no, but this is a lie. It does. Did you know that each of the Anastasia books is a different color? Assembling them all took a while. Take my advice and don’t arrange your books by color, no matter how cool it looks.)

As a quick overview, the Anastasia series consists of nine books that follow the adventures of a girl named Anastasia Krupnik, who lives in Boston with her parents and her little brother Sam. And when I say “adventures,” I mean things like having to do a science fair project and having her best friend go away to summer camp. These are low-drama books. However, looking through them, I was reminded of what I loved so much as a child about the books: Anastasia was smart. She wasn’t always right, but she was always thinking and planning and having ideas, and her (slightly neurotic) inner life seemed to more closely resemble my own than that of most kids’ book characters. Looking through them now as an adult, I can also see more clearly that while Anastasia is smart, she is still a kid and is still making some of the crazy of leaps of logic and wild decisions that kids make. In my favorite of the books, Anastasia On Her Own, thirteen-year-old Anastasia is in charge of the house while her mother is away on business and decides (for a variety of reasons) to cook a dinner that includes Ragout de Veau aux Champignons (I like to imagine this was a Julia Child recipe). Anastasia uses some fairly creative problem-solving and does manage to successfully cook the dish, but the dinner itself turns into a disaster. The whole situation ends up being absurd, in the way that a thirteen-year-old’s decisions are absurd. And yet, I can also see myself ending up in the same situation at that age.

According to Wikipedia, these books have been challenged because of “references to beer, Playboy Magazine, and a casual reference to a character wanting to kill herself.” This makes me wonder if the people who are apparently out there complaining about these books today have read ANY of the dark young adult fiction that has come out in the last ten years. Which is not to say that I think that books that actually show children DRINKING beer, rather than just referencing it, should be banned. (I think it’s safe to say that I am against book banning in general.) I actually think that the fact that books as innocent as these end up on the list makes it easy to dismiss people who try to get books pulled. They come off seeming like crackpots for complaining about nothing and I don’t even bother taking them seriously. But, we should take them seriously, because sometimes they succeed. And it make me sad to think that some smart, neurotic girl out there might not get to read an Anastasia Krupnik book because one of the characters has the nerve to discuss a Playboy magazine.

So, in conclusion, banning books is bad and Anastasia Krupnik is awesome, and it is ridiculous to me that the two even have to be in the same sentence. Also, Wikipedia tells me that an Anastasia book came out in 1995. Considering that I was 20 in 1995, I’m fairly sure that I haven’t read that one yet, and will need to make a trip to my library soon. Yay for more Anastasia!

Biblio-therapy

Author Archives: Kinsey