Collected Miscellany

Like so many, a big part of my becoming a devoted reader at a young age was the magical books of fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I jumped from these “classics” to many others (magical worlds like the humorous  Xanth and the adventurous Pern).  And I still read fantasy; even young adult fantasy like Harry Potter and the explosion of works that followed in the wake of that phenomenon.

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

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Image via Wikipedia

I will admit that I got suckered into buying the The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling.  I wasn’t all that tempted to buy it at first.  But then I saw it at the grocery store of all places and heavily discounted.  I then rationalized that I should have it with the rest of the series and who knows it might be interesting, right?

Wrong. Maybe the book is interesting to young Harry Potter enthusiasts, but this adult found the book to be boring and completely devoid of the personality of the series as a whole.

If you don’t know exactly what the book is, let us turn to Wikipedia.  First, its origins in the series:

The Tales of Beedle the Bard first appeared as a fictional book, used as a plot device, in J. K. Rowling’s 2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final novel of the Harry Potter series. The book is bequeathed to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It is described as a popular collection of Wizarding children’s fairy tales, so that while Ron Weasley is familiar with the stories, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger had not previously heard them due to their non-magical upbringing.

Then how it became a book of its own:

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a book of children’s stories by British author J. K. Rowling. It purports to be the storybook of the same name mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series.

The book was originally produced in a limited edition of only seven copies, each handwritten and illustrated by J. K. Rowling. One of them was offered for auction in late 2007 and was expected to sell for £50,000 ($103,000); ultimately it was bought for £1.95 million ($3.98 million) by Amazon.com, making the selling price the highest achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript. The money earned at the auction of the book was donated to The Children’s Voice charity campaign.

All well and good I suppose.  Friends thanks and money for charity raised.  But the book itself – the stories and commentary – just are not very interesting.  They seem the kind of thing that might have been useful as an appendix rather than a stand alone book.

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