epershand | The meta-fantasy novels of my heart

I've spent the last week slowly working my way through Among Others. It's such a beautiful book, I'm limiting myself to stretch it out as long as possible. I don't want the plot to resolve, I don't want the book to end. I just want to keep following Mori forever.

When Olivia was reading this last spring, she kept reading me the snippets of Mori responding to the books she'd read. Which sounded awesome (hello reading materials of my wayward youth!) but in no way, shape or form prepared me for the book I'm reading.

What I love most about this book is the way that I genuinely have no idea which of two possible books it is that I'm reading:

1) The children's fantasy novel I have spent my entire life waiting to read, about what happens to you once you've left your striking adventures in faerie behind and have to return to the mundane world after defeating the Evil Queen.
2) An entirely mundane novel about an abused teenager who deals with her trauma by imagining that she is living out the option above.

I'm swinging back between the two options on a word-by word basis, reading both books simultaneously. So far, it's the Schrödinger's cat of novels and part of me is terrified to get to the end of the book for fear that the box will open and I'll get trapped in one reading or another. (Hopefully this won't happen.)

I love that the very things that make Mori so identifiable to me are precisely what makes me not trust her. Because... I was that unhappy teenager, and those were the sorts of stories I told myself to deal.

But when I let myself fully believe her, FUCK is that some awesome worldbuilding. I love the deniability of it all, the way that every act of magic could be dismissed as having a totally rational non-magical cause, because part of the magic is to line up all the events in the past to bring something about. It's *brilliant*. I love watching Mori talking about the Pevensies after Narnia and the Drews after Will, in the context that that is exactly where she is in her life at the start of the book. I love the creepy aunties and their magic of lethargy and order and pushing things to play out as they want, for their own benefit. It is so good.

And so is the other book, the one that is more Bridge to Terabithia than it is Narnia. Honestly, I think Terabithia mattered more to me when I was young than Narnia did, because it gave me the assurance that taking the outlet was ok even if the magical land didn't actually pick me up and carry me off, North-Wind style.

I've been burned enough times to be very wary of sequels.

The Magicians was so good. It was the perfect encapsulation of so much emotional and intellectual satisfaction for me. It filled a hole in my soul that I didn't quite know was missing before I read it.

And I really should be able to trust Lev Grossman. He wrote The Magicians, after all, that tight perfect novel that feels like it was meant to complete me. And his essay on fanfiction and his manners in doing research for it has made me doubly fond of him.

But... that book was complete. It was a capsule, it was perfect, and while there are many other stories that could be told in that universe, that book feels like the only one I NEEDED. I don't even want fanfic of it, most of the time. And I'm desperately afraid that another book will throw off the balance, and do so far enough that it will detract from the perfect union that the first book had with my fundamental self.

So I am going to hold off now and let other people read it first, before I make up my mind to take that risk.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

*adds to library list*

Hurrah! They are both excellent library books, especially since both of them about characters who spend most of their time in libraries.

Re Among Others: if you wish to avoid being trapped in one reading, don't read anything the author's said about it online. The book is ambiguous; she isn't.

Thanks for the warning. I'll follow your advice. Olivia told me she'd said that "nothing was true except the magic", which is helpfully as ambiguous as the book. I will live in a world where that's the only thing she's said.

Huh, funny! I'm dying to read The Magician King -- I'll probably drop everything I have and read it in a marathon as soon as I get my hands on it. But when I said that and my friend commented she was envious I had a book I was looking forward to that much, I said, "Well it's mostly because my reaction to the end of The Magicians," was WHAT THAT'S IT THERE'D BETTER BE A FREAKING SEQUEL!?

There's some kind of moral about reader-response in that :). Anyway I will probably be posting my reactions --

Excellent, I'm glad you're reading it, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it as a decision-making tool for whether I should read it!

I think... if there was another book that was all Julia, I would absolutely read that one. And I'm really excited that this one is mostly Julia! But... I think I am done with the Quentin narrative arc. I sort of wish the last chapter of the book hadn't happened. My reaction to it was "fuck, there's going to be a sequel?"

I don't even remember which one was Julia!

I was totally reading the Alice book. . .

I was pretty much reading the Alice book too! Which is part of my hesitance to read more books about Quentin. Julia is the hedge witch.

What I've heard about the new book is that it's less Quentin-focused and improves on a lot of the problems I had with the first book. But if you really loved it this may be less of a draw? I don't know.

Less Quentin-focused would be good. I... actually did have a lot of problems with the first book, but in this way where I... loved the problems and felt like they contributed to the things I was liking even while being irked? I don't know.

I think we might have had similar feelings about it -- only my reaction was 'I'd like to read a book like this only without the parts that annoyed me, maybe that is what the sequel will be!' And of course now I can't remember who told me that stuff about the sequel and whether they're a reliable source.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see how it turns out. Lev Grossman is certainly one of those guys I want to root for.

Did you ever make up your mind about The Magician King? I'm almost finished with it and could give some thoughts about whether it's worth your time but this might be old news by now and I don't know how much you want spoiled. . .

I'm still waiting to hear back from people who've read it, so I'd actually love your thoughts in general.

I'll wait until I'm truly finished to say anything definitive but I'm not sure I can recommend this one. There's a lot of Julia but the arcs feel mostly repetitive of the first book (they thought magic would be awesome but. . .) And several upsetting/potentially triggery things happen in the Julia parts (I don't know if you want more spoilers than that). I'll likely finish it this afternoon and be able to give a full verdict.

Oh bummer, I'm really sorry to hear that. My original impulse had been that he'd done everything really interesting in the first book, which wouldn't leave much conceptually for the second, but I was trying to be cautiously optimistic.

There's sort of a different/parallel metaphor for magic in Julia's story (think the intersection of rogue computer hackers + high functioning mental illness instead of elite prep school) so if that pings you it might be worth checking out. Unless something really changes in the last chapter, though, the payoff of the plot has me saying, "Really you went there??"

Oh, huh, I might wind up having to read it just to make sure something separate I'm writing doesn't wind up being too close to what he does. :/

Yeah. . .it's not unenjoyable, and there are some cool setpieces within it. Just don't expect a lot of thematic growth from the earlier book and like I said, there are some triggery things.

Funnily enough, I was just talking to Dave about these exact two books today.

Among Others, he found on his Kindle, could not remember buying it, and could not remember why he bought it. We deduced finally that it was because of his reaction to Tooth And Claw, which is a Walton book about dragons. Reading your description now, I wonder if he picked it up in reaction to The Magicians.

...and speaking of, I hadn't realized that the sequel was about to come out so soon. I loved the first book, so I'm hopeful about this second one. I, like you, am also done with Quentin, but a book about Julia could be good. I guess the first was an excellent escape book, but i wanted more.

OMG, wtf, dw, i was logged in!

The meta-fantasy novels of my heart

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