AUTHOR: Ken Jennings (a.k.a., that guy that was on Jeopardy for like, forever)
PUBLISHED: 2011
GENRE: Non-fiction
It should come as no surprise to you all that in addition to my love of words, Star Trek, and ancient history, I also have a love of maps. This (along with the Star Trek thing) I blame on my mother, who still has decades-old New York City maps in her hutch. I also enjoy Jeopardy, mainly because it's about the only time I can yell at the TV screen and not get told to just relax. Hence my Christmas request for "Maphead".
"Maphead" is all about how loving maps can be fun and is not, as was previously believed, something that needed to be hidden as a shameful fetish. It's part of the whole nerd renaissance: it's suddenly cool to admit you like something unusual or, heaven forbid, educational. Jennings is quite obviously a Bill Bryson fan*, modelling his writing style on Bryson's easy-going, lots-of-random-facts and humerous sidebars style. But as simplistic as that style may seem, it's amazingly hard to replicate. Jennings can't do it, and as a result ends up with a bunch of wandering chapters that aren't particularly connected in any way. There's one about geocaching, another about the National Geography Bee, another about the Library of Congress's map division. There's some history in some, none in others. There's lots of people he interviewed who I'm sure were fascinating in person but whose stories are flat on the page. Every chapter seems to go on for a few pages too long. This isn't to say that it's all bad, or that most of the information isn't interesting. But what is good just gets lost amongst everything else.
Jennings also horribly abuses a sensitive writing tool: the footnote.** Nobody loves a fun footnote more than me. But Jennings's footnotes are rarely fun and are often ridiculously long. If you're past 10 lines in your footnote, it's time to rethink whether it all a) needs to go in the main body or b) needs to get cut totally. Some pages have 2 or 3 footnotes, with another footnote on the opposite page. The short ones often aren't that great either - a quip about how nobody watched CBS's morning show in the '80s might seem funny at the time, but it ain't gonna last. It's more information in a book that's already chock full of it.
There's an earnest quality to it all that makes you want to like it, like a mother looking at her child's incomprehensible painting and cooing, it's beautiful! Jennings put his heart into this thing. That's why it so sad it doesn't work out.
PAGES: 249
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: The whole point of it all is that it isn't mainstream.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: It tries hard, but never particularly finds its way.
*Not to be all Bill Bryson all the time, but in this case, it applies. Jennings himself quotes one of Bryson's travel books.
**I know. That's rich, me complaining about footnotes. I'll give you a few moments to snort derisively and mutter, where does she get off...
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
One for the Money
AUTHOR: Janet Evanovich
PUBLISHED: 1994
GENRE: Mystery
This is, as you may know, the first of the Stephanie Plum novels, a line of books which has become enormously successful, successful enough to warrent Katherine Hagel's participation in the movie.* I actually read this book once before, a long time ago, during a summer internship at Merrill Lynch, which was less an internship and more 8 weeks of me staring at the wall and waiting for my supervisor to get back from "physical therapy".** To make a long story short, the books were given to me by two secretaries who had taken upon themselves to give me an all-over makeover, although it really ended with the books and a trip to the Quakerbridge Mall Macy's make-up counter.*** Not that any of this matters, as I did not remember the story in the least.
The basic premise is fairly well-known at this point: Plum, down on her luck, goes to work for Cousin Vinny as the most inept bounty hunter that ever existed, tracking down various low-lifes and drunkards while fending off her mother's attempts to feed her and get her a job at the button factory. The stories are set in Hamilton and Trenton, not too far from your fair blogger, and thus hold a certain charm for we Central Jerseyites who are tired of Newark getting all the glory, or at least all the press. The stories (at least the first one) teeters between aw-shucks everyman-ness and complete absurdity, the hallmark of an author who has been told to keep her characters relatable but really likes writing action.
For most of the book, Plum is actively pursued by a crazed boxer who is known for raping and torturing women. This guy knows where she lives. He knows she lives alone. He knows that she has had her phone turned off and, it being 1994, she has no cell phone. And yet she stays there alone, and goes for unaccompanied runs, and continues to obviously patrol his neighborhood with no back-up. She is grabbed by him at least 3 times, and is only able to squirm her way out of the situation at the last second. Her actions just don't make sense, and Evanovich treats the very real danger her character is in with a somewhat disturbing lightness. Her car blows up with someone inside and it's all jokes about missing eyebrows.
But this isn't supposed to be super-accurate. It's supposed to be fun, and for most of the time, it is. It got a few chuckles out of me. Maybe as she went along (goes along, really, considering she's still pumping these babies out), Evanovich fine-tuned her writing. Probably not. But it's worth giving it a try anyway.
LENGTH: 290 quick pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Katherine Hagel, man!
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT: Yeah, sure. Just know that there are about 57 more to follow.
*I do not like Katherine Hagel. She has what can clinically be termed a bitch face, which is not to say she is a bitch, but rather that she always looks like she just smelled something disgusting. She is one of the many actors whose work I catagorically avoid. In case you're wondering, the list also includes Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, and Tom Cruise, among others.
**A week before I started, the other intern, a frat boy named Rob who listened to a lot of Dave Matthews Band, was driving our supervisor back from lunch, gravely mistimed the left-turn signal off Scudders Mill Road, and got them in an accident. I use quotes when I say "physical therapy", however, because the sessions generally coincided particularly well with tee times and liquid lunches.
***A trip during which we met Corky from "Life Goes On", but that's a whole other story.
PUBLISHED: 1994
GENRE: Mystery
This is, as you may know, the first of the Stephanie Plum novels, a line of books which has become enormously successful, successful enough to warrent Katherine Hagel's participation in the movie.* I actually read this book once before, a long time ago, during a summer internship at Merrill Lynch, which was less an internship and more 8 weeks of me staring at the wall and waiting for my supervisor to get back from "physical therapy".** To make a long story short, the books were given to me by two secretaries who had taken upon themselves to give me an all-over makeover, although it really ended with the books and a trip to the Quakerbridge Mall Macy's make-up counter.*** Not that any of this matters, as I did not remember the story in the least.
The basic premise is fairly well-known at this point: Plum, down on her luck, goes to work for Cousin Vinny as the most inept bounty hunter that ever existed, tracking down various low-lifes and drunkards while fending off her mother's attempts to feed her and get her a job at the button factory. The stories are set in Hamilton and Trenton, not too far from your fair blogger, and thus hold a certain charm for we Central Jerseyites who are tired of Newark getting all the glory, or at least all the press. The stories (at least the first one) teeters between aw-shucks everyman-ness and complete absurdity, the hallmark of an author who has been told to keep her characters relatable but really likes writing action.
For most of the book, Plum is actively pursued by a crazed boxer who is known for raping and torturing women. This guy knows where she lives. He knows she lives alone. He knows that she has had her phone turned off and, it being 1994, she has no cell phone. And yet she stays there alone, and goes for unaccompanied runs, and continues to obviously patrol his neighborhood with no back-up. She is grabbed by him at least 3 times, and is only able to squirm her way out of the situation at the last second. Her actions just don't make sense, and Evanovich treats the very real danger her character is in with a somewhat disturbing lightness. Her car blows up with someone inside and it's all jokes about missing eyebrows.
But this isn't supposed to be super-accurate. It's supposed to be fun, and for most of the time, it is. It got a few chuckles out of me. Maybe as she went along (goes along, really, considering she's still pumping these babies out), Evanovich fine-tuned her writing. Probably not. But it's worth giving it a try anyway.
LENGTH: 290 quick pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Katherine Hagel, man!
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT: Yeah, sure. Just know that there are about 57 more to follow.
*I do not like Katherine Hagel. She has what can clinically be termed a bitch face, which is not to say she is a bitch, but rather that she always looks like she just smelled something disgusting. She is one of the many actors whose work I catagorically avoid. In case you're wondering, the list also includes Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, and Tom Cruise, among others.
**A week before I started, the other intern, a frat boy named Rob who listened to a lot of Dave Matthews Band, was driving our supervisor back from lunch, gravely mistimed the left-turn signal off Scudders Mill Road, and got them in an accident. I use quotes when I say "physical therapy", however, because the sessions generally coincided particularly well with tee times and liquid lunches.
***A trip during which we met Corky from "Life Goes On", but that's a whole other story.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
How I Became A Famous Novelist
AUTHOR: Steve Hely
PUBLISHED: 2009
GENRE: Fiction
This book got picked purely for its title. After all, who could resist the opportunity to learn how some other hapless fool went from aspiring writer to acclaimed novelist. Hely's book is told in the first person, , full of sidebars and lists: "list of bestselling ideas"; "Miller Westly's notes"; "what happened at the first bar" (followed, unsurprisingly, by "what happened at the second bar"). It's supposed to be a casual conversation, two friends joking and talking. But it's not casual. It's unbelievably hyper-self-aware. All that intense trying makes you tense.
Pete Tarslaw spends his days writing college admission essays for lazy teenagers. When he gets a wedding invitation from his college girlfriend Polly, he decides that he has to finally make something of himself to show her how wrong she was to leave him. He's watching an interview with Preston Brooks, wealthy novelist, when he decides that's what he'll do: he'll write a book. But not a good book. A book with every cliche, every foreign setting, every kooky subplot, everything anyone could ever want all in one book. It's worked for others, he figures, so why not him? He gets published, mainly because he has a friend who works for a publisher (how convenient). But being a famous author isn't anything like he thought it would be.
When he's not writing, Tarslaw is studying the best-sellers list for clues as to how to get on there himself. There's the aforementioned Preston Brooks, who writes books named Kindness of Birds about how one man changes the lives of a bunch of strangers. There's Pamela McLaughlin's series of Trang Martinez novels, a Kay Scarpetta-esque character who finds murders everywhere. Then there's Sageknights of Darkhorn, number 15 in something akin to Game of Thrones. It's all a little too on the nose. (Okay, it's a lot on the nose.) Hely is that guy at the bar who interrupts his own story to laugh at it, rather than letting you laugh at it yourself, which you probably wouldn't do anyway, because it wasn't very funny. Everything he writes is supposed to let you know just how in the know he is.
By the time Hely tries to get serious, you're so done with his jokes that you don't care about his problems. To make it worse, Hely's attempts at serious fall (seriously) short, ending up closer to whiny than deep. It's the stench of desperation that does him in, really. It sets in from the start and stinks up the whole thing.
LENGTH: 322 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Not particularly
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: If someone has to work that hard to convince you of how cool there are, it's not worth listening.
PUBLISHED: 2009
GENRE: Fiction
This book got picked purely for its title. After all, who could resist the opportunity to learn how some other hapless fool went from aspiring writer to acclaimed novelist. Hely's book is told in the first person, , full of sidebars and lists: "list of bestselling ideas"; "Miller Westly's notes"; "what happened at the first bar" (followed, unsurprisingly, by "what happened at the second bar"). It's supposed to be a casual conversation, two friends joking and talking. But it's not casual. It's unbelievably hyper-self-aware. All that intense trying makes you tense.
Pete Tarslaw spends his days writing college admission essays for lazy teenagers. When he gets a wedding invitation from his college girlfriend Polly, he decides that he has to finally make something of himself to show her how wrong she was to leave him. He's watching an interview with Preston Brooks, wealthy novelist, when he decides that's what he'll do: he'll write a book. But not a good book. A book with every cliche, every foreign setting, every kooky subplot, everything anyone could ever want all in one book. It's worked for others, he figures, so why not him? He gets published, mainly because he has a friend who works for a publisher (how convenient). But being a famous author isn't anything like he thought it would be.
When he's not writing, Tarslaw is studying the best-sellers list for clues as to how to get on there himself. There's the aforementioned Preston Brooks, who writes books named Kindness of Birds about how one man changes the lives of a bunch of strangers. There's Pamela McLaughlin's series of Trang Martinez novels, a Kay Scarpetta-esque character who finds murders everywhere. Then there's Sageknights of Darkhorn, number 15 in something akin to Game of Thrones. It's all a little too on the nose. (Okay, it's a lot on the nose.) Hely is that guy at the bar who interrupts his own story to laugh at it, rather than letting you laugh at it yourself, which you probably wouldn't do anyway, because it wasn't very funny. Everything he writes is supposed to let you know just how in the know he is.
By the time Hely tries to get serious, you're so done with his jokes that you don't care about his problems. To make it worse, Hely's attempts at serious fall (seriously) short, ending up closer to whiny than deep. It's the stench of desperation that does him in, really. It sets in from the start and stinks up the whole thing.
LENGTH: 322 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Not particularly
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: If someone has to work that hard to convince you of how cool there are, it's not worth listening.
Friday, January 6, 2012
The Uncoupling
AUTHOR: Meg Wolitzer
PUBLISHED: 2011
GENRE: Fiction
I can only imagine what Sigmund Freud would have to say about pop culture's sudden interest in Lysistrata. One of the few extant plays of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, Lysistrata is the tale of one women's crusade to persuade* the women of Greece to boycott sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War. Given ancient Greece's strict gender roles, theatergoers must have been shocked by its forward content.** It's still shocking enough to merit a mini-renaissance. The play has spurned a musical, Lysistrata Jones, which had been getting great reviews. It also inspired Wolitzer to write this book.
Dory and Robby Lang are those people: happy in their jobs, satisfied in their marriage, they teach together at the local high school, where they are the cool teachers. Everything's on an even keel until the new drama teacher proposes Lysistrata for the fall play. The problem isn't so much the play as the spell that accompanies it: suddenly, inexplicably, every women in town stops having sex with her significant other. Marriages grow awkward and stale. Passionate first loves die a painful death. The whole town is suffering and no one knows why.
The prose starts strong but peters out pitifully, along with the plot line. The book begs two huge questions. First, what the hell kind of high school would allow a sex comedy (see the lioness in the cheese grater below) as the school play? A few parents complain but the principal shuts them down in the name of freedom of expression. The play is so shoehorned into the plot as to never be really believable. The second question: what is the spell? The spirit of Aristophanes come to life? A wicked witch blown in from Oz? The eventual answer - which isn't really an answer at all - is seriously lame.
The story is wandering along sort of aimlessly when the last-act subplot kicks the reader in the nuts - the girl set to play Lysistrata wakes up one morning refusing to get out of bed until the US pulls out of Afghanistan. Suddenly, the play's main action is split into two - an act of protest, and a sex strike. Separated out, neither makes sense. The protest loses any potency and becomes the silly act of a teenage girl; the sex strike loses any purpose and becomes either a supernatural spell or an unbelievable coincidence. I imagine Wolitzer was trying to avoid the accusation that she had just modernized the language of an old play. To have kept the action together - the students are inspired by the play and dump their boyfriends, for instance - would have been a more literal telling. But it also would have made a lot more sense.
The whole thing is incredible awkward. This might have been what Wolitzer was going for - after all, it's all very personal what these people are experiencing.*** Unfortunately, that's the only thing that works.
LENGTH: 288 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Sure.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No. It's a poor reflection on a 2,500-year-old classic.
*Persuade, not convince, since it's an action, not a belief. See? Fun!
** The women give a speech listing their favorite sexual positions, including - I kid you not - the lioness on the cheese grater. I cannot say if something was lost in the translation from the original Greek. I'd rather not say anything else, actually; this is a family blog. (Okay, one thing. They had cheese graters in ancient Greece?) Just thought I'd throw that out there.
***It's not exactly lunch table conversation. "So, Sue, I've found recently that the thought of sleeping my husband is revolting to me, and I would rather sacrifice my marriage than touch him. How about you and Bob?"
PUBLISHED: 2011
GENRE: Fiction
I can only imagine what Sigmund Freud would have to say about pop culture's sudden interest in Lysistrata. One of the few extant plays of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, Lysistrata is the tale of one women's crusade to persuade* the women of Greece to boycott sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War. Given ancient Greece's strict gender roles, theatergoers must have been shocked by its forward content.** It's still shocking enough to merit a mini-renaissance. The play has spurned a musical, Lysistrata Jones, which had been getting great reviews. It also inspired Wolitzer to write this book.
Dory and Robby Lang are those people: happy in their jobs, satisfied in their marriage, they teach together at the local high school, where they are the cool teachers. Everything's on an even keel until the new drama teacher proposes Lysistrata for the fall play. The problem isn't so much the play as the spell that accompanies it: suddenly, inexplicably, every women in town stops having sex with her significant other. Marriages grow awkward and stale. Passionate first loves die a painful death. The whole town is suffering and no one knows why.
The prose starts strong but peters out pitifully, along with the plot line. The book begs two huge questions. First, what the hell kind of high school would allow a sex comedy (see the lioness in the cheese grater below) as the school play? A few parents complain but the principal shuts them down in the name of freedom of expression. The play is so shoehorned into the plot as to never be really believable. The second question: what is the spell? The spirit of Aristophanes come to life? A wicked witch blown in from Oz? The eventual answer - which isn't really an answer at all - is seriously lame.
The story is wandering along sort of aimlessly when the last-act subplot kicks the reader in the nuts - the girl set to play Lysistrata wakes up one morning refusing to get out of bed until the US pulls out of Afghanistan. Suddenly, the play's main action is split into two - an act of protest, and a sex strike. Separated out, neither makes sense. The protest loses any potency and becomes the silly act of a teenage girl; the sex strike loses any purpose and becomes either a supernatural spell or an unbelievable coincidence. I imagine Wolitzer was trying to avoid the accusation that she had just modernized the language of an old play. To have kept the action together - the students are inspired by the play and dump their boyfriends, for instance - would have been a more literal telling. But it also would have made a lot more sense.
The whole thing is incredible awkward. This might have been what Wolitzer was going for - after all, it's all very personal what these people are experiencing.*** Unfortunately, that's the only thing that works.
LENGTH: 288 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Sure.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No. It's a poor reflection on a 2,500-year-old classic.
*Persuade, not convince, since it's an action, not a belief. See? Fun!
** The women give a speech listing their favorite sexual positions, including - I kid you not - the lioness on the cheese grater. I cannot say if something was lost in the translation from the original Greek. I'd rather not say anything else, actually; this is a family blog. (Okay, one thing. They had cheese graters in ancient Greece?) Just thought I'd throw that out there.
***It's not exactly lunch table conversation. "So, Sue, I've found recently that the thought of sleeping my husband is revolting to me, and I would rather sacrifice my marriage than touch him. How about you and Bob?"
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words & Reading the OED
Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right
AUTHOR: Ernest Hemingway. No, not really. Bill Bryson.
PUBLISHED: First edition, 1983; second edition, 2004
GENRE: Reference
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
AUTHOR: Ammon Shea
PUBLISHED: 2009
GENRE: Reference
It is a source of some great amusement for some around me that I have a habit of reading books that are basically dictionaries. To them, such an endeavor would seem as useful, or as fun, as reading a phonebook. But I love it. It’s where the writer and the history major in me meet: new words + how they came to be = joy.
But not all word compellations (these aren’t really dictionaries, in that they are not all-encompassing, in length or in explanation) are built the same. Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words is a practical guide. For writers, it’s the answers to all those grammatical queries that begin with wait, is it (blank) or (blank)? and end with, ah, crap. I should really know this. It reminds us of the difference between factious and factitious, explains the differences between fable, myth, and parable, and clarifies the correct spelling – or lack thereof – of the Great Bard’s last name. (Shockingly, there is no real consensus on how to spell Shakespeare. Some add the last e, some don’t. The OED spells it as Shakspere. But more on the OED later.) A good example looks like this:
Historic, historical. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted yesterday to create a historical district on a gilded stretch of Manhatten’s East Side” (New York Times). Generally speaking, something that makes history or is part of history, as in the example above, is historic. Something that is based on history or describes history is historical (“a historical novel”).
Some of them really are limited in their practically uses, such as my favorite, the difference between convince and persuade:
Convince, persuade. Although often used interchangeably, the words are not quite the same. Briefly, you convince someone that he should believe but persuade him to act. It is possible to persuade a person to do something without convincing him of the correctness or necessity of doing it.
I cannot imagine ever being chastised for saying, “I convinced him to go to the movies”, rather than “I persuaded him to go to the movies”, but it’s good to know the difference nonetheless.
Reading the OED is a far less practical affair. Author Ammon Shea is an extreme lexiphile and a collector of dictionaries. (A lexiphile is someone who loves words, much like a cinephile loves movies and a Francophile loves French stuff. A person who hated words would be a lexiphobe.) Hence his decision to read the entirety of the OED, or the Oxford English Dictionary, the alpha and omega of dictionaries. This thing is huge. Over 20,000 pages huge. The simplest of words – set, make, lie – can take up a dozen pages. The OED doesn’t just give you the definition, it gives you the etymology, or the history, of it, with specific examples of usage. Reading all 20 volumes is not for the faint of heart, and sometimes, Shea’s narrative makes it sound like he’s on his way up Mount Kilimanjaro. It makes some sense then that Shea decided not to focus on the practical but on the fantastic, singling out those words you didn’t know existed and couldn’t have ever possibly imagined. For example:
Acnestis (n.) On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched.
If my dog could speak, I’m pretty sure he would just say, “I can’t reach that damn spot!”, not, “I cannot each my acnestis.”. There is no real conceivable usage for such a word. And yet, it exists. Some of the entries are disgusting even on the page, leading you to wonder what the heck the writer could have been doing to necessitate its invention:
Rhypophagy (n.): The eating of filth or disgusting matter.
Or:
Unbepissed (adj.): Not having been urinated on; unwet with urine.
This would seem at first a good thing, but its mere creation implies that there was once so much being peed on that to be dry needed specifying.
Some are words that were once presumably commonplace but are now forgotten:
Bowelless (adj.): Having no bowels; lacking in mercy or compassion.
This word might finally explain that peculiar scene in A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge states that people had always said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.
Others deserve to be resurrected:
Jehu (n.): A fast or reckless driver.*
Jehu was an Israelite king renowned for his furious chariot driving, as explained in 2 Kings 9:20: “the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously”. Apparently the ancient Israelites had road rage issues just like us.
Or:
Natiform (adj.): Buttock-shaped.
A word that could be applied to Kim Kardashian in various ways.
The problem with Shea’s book is that while the words may seem so outlandish at the time of reading as to be indelibly burned into your brain, they often disappear as soon as you turn the page, because there can be no practical usage for them. Hence there’s a lot of, I have to tell someone about this!, only to be followed by, what was that word again?. Bryson’s book, while not nearly as titillating, is far more applicable, especially if one writes or reads on a regular basis. It’s a good ol’ copy of Webster’s Dictionary to Shea’s randy urbandictionary.com. Either way, if you like words, you’ll enjoy yourself. Just prepare yourself for the funny looks.
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No, as much as I would love for people to enjoy dictionaries as much as I do.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Either one will work for a lexiphile. If you are looking for something to explain whether to use affect or effect in your report, Bryson’s is the way to go. Shea’s is the one you read for fun and then leave on the shelf; Bryson’s is the one you’ll go back to over and over again.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
The Magicians & The Magician King
AUTHOR: Les Grossman
PUBLISHED: 2010 and 2011. Dang, dude works fast.
GENRE: Fantasy
The first book seemed to drag at the end, but that might have had more to do with the fact that I already knew who lived and who died. (Whoops! Spoiler. Someone dies eventually.) The second book moves back and forth through the narrative much more than the first, filling in the alternate back story for one of the characters who didn’t really feature in the first book. After all that back story, I couldn’t help but spend the first book wondering where she was***. In a way, I’m somewhat unqualified to review these books, given my backward reading of them. I can’t say that any of my complaints carry any weight if one, you know, reads the first one first. What I do know if that I’m quite happy I starting reading them after both were published. If I had had to wait to see what happened, I would have been pissed. So I guess I should be pleased with how I stumbled on them after all.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes. The writing shouldn’t work – it plays so fast and loose between high fantasy and street slang – but somehow it does. Just read it in the right order, would ya?
PUBLISHED: 2010 and 2011. Dang, dude works fast.
GENRE: Fantasy
I have something embarrassing to admit: I read these books in the wrong order. What’s worse, I was 380 pages into The Magician King before I realized that it was a sequel, and even then it took a quick book jacket check to confirm it. It is a testament to the quality of the writing that the second book stood pretty soundly on its own. A skipping timeline helped too.* But we’ll get to that later.
The Magicians begins with Quentin Coldwater, a rather depressed young man. This teenaged Brooklynite spends a good portion of his time trailing his best friend James and thinking about how much he loves James’s girlfriend Julia and how really, really unhappy he is. About the only thing that brings him any joy is his magic – making coins disappear and cards shuffle on their own. Then, quite suddenly, he’s in upstate New York at a very strange place taking a very strange test with some very strange professors.** This strange place is Brakebills. It’s a magical college, and Quentin’s about to make it home.
To keep going would give away too much plot line of either book. It’s too finely interwoven to try and tease out anything else. It’s a hardcore mixture of reality and fantasy – and not just the plotline, but the language. Grossman uses a familiar tone and slang even in the most fantastical of conversations and yet, somehow, it doesn’t sound weird. This is reality for these kids. It involves spells and incantations and the Beast breaking into the middle of calculus class and eating a student, but it also involves malaise and difficulties at home and the eternal question of the graduating college student: what the hell am I going to do now. Quentin and his friends just end up with an answer that’s a little different.The first book seemed to drag at the end, but that might have had more to do with the fact that I already knew who lived and who died. (Whoops! Spoiler. Someone dies eventually.) The second book moves back and forth through the narrative much more than the first, filling in the alternate back story for one of the characters who didn’t really feature in the first book. After all that back story, I couldn’t help but spend the first book wondering where she was***. In a way, I’m somewhat unqualified to review these books, given my backward reading of them. I can’t say that any of my complaints carry any weight if one, you know, reads the first one first. What I do know if that I’m quite happy I starting reading them after both were published. If I had had to wait to see what happened, I would have been pissed. So I guess I should be pleased with how I stumbled on them after all.
LENGTH: 416 pages and… 416 pages! Impressive.
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No.SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes. The writing shouldn’t work – it plays so fast and loose between high fantasy and street slang – but somehow it does. Just read it in the right order, would ya?
*The truth is, with the skipping timeline, I just kept assuming that all those vague references to lost characters would be explained at the end. Then the end was there and it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. That’s when I looked at the inside front book cover and thought, Oh. Damn. I have to go back to the library.
**This seems to be the view of many a New York Borough resident. The five boroughs? Reality. Upstate New York? A strange, strange land! Everyone else? The neitherworld.
***If I was smart I would have known that they wouldn’t have needed all the back story in the second book if she was discussed in the first, but sometimes you just get an idea stuck in your head, you know?
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