I don’t care that apparently everyone on this planet loves this book. I didn’t. I finished it yesterday and I have already forgotten who characters were and what motivated them. It just didn’t stick with me.

I think I’m done with reading Vonnegut for a little bit.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

When I was in high school, I loved the Harry Potter books. I thought they were wonderfully imaginative and the world that J.K. Rowling built, especially Hogwart’s, seemed so well fleshed out and beautiful. As the books went on and I got older though, one thing started really bothering me. Harry Potter isn’t a good wizard. Neither is Ron. How is it that a trio containing two mediocre child magicians can take down the most powerful of the world’s adults? And please don’t say something like “Love” or “Bravery”, that’s overly simplistic. The more I read of the world that Rowling wrote, the more cartoony and caricaturish it seemed. The teachers could all be pulled from after school specials. The ancillary student characters, with a few notable exceptions, were all fairly one-note, and the ending of book seven seemed all wrong to me. And don’t even get me started on the epilogue. Ugh. I know that the book follows the basic hero’s journey and all that blah blah blah, but… the books haven’t stuck with me. I saw a couple of the movies, and have no interest to see any of the others.

Seeing as my last experience reading a fantasy book about life at a school for magic left me feeling unsatisfied, it was with some trepidation that I dove into Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. To me, it was a breath of fresh air. There were some tried and true fantasy novel tropes, but this magical world was firmly planted in a world more nuanced than what I’ve read before.

Our main character is an unsympathetic guy named Quentin. At eighteen years old, he gets sucked into Brakebills, America’s magical boarding school. By making the students older, the author is able to explore more adult themes earlier in the story. The years fly by, and Quentin and his friends don’t have to face down a terrible evil at the end of the year while at the same time studying for finals.

In The Magicians, magic is hard. It’s for the brainiacs, the select few who can obsessively practice an art form to the point of perfection. It’s for those few geniuses who have the ability to wield their austistic hyper-focus on making their fingers wiggle in exactly the correct pattern time after time. You don’t just pick up a wand and flick it around, and have awesome things happen. The main character in this book isn’t a hero, nor is he an anti-hero. It often seems like he is just going through the motions, and his life is being propelled by unseen forces. He’s a bit of a sad sack. Obsessed by a Narnia-esque children’s book, the world into which he is flung just doesn’t seem quite right for him. His circle of friends doesn’t seem to be friends only because they were flung together by random circumstance.

I appreciated that this book takes place over more than a decade. It gives a lot more opportunity for character growth, for people to fall in and out of love, for jobs to because dull and pointless. Quentin’s circle of friends all graduate from Brakebills, are flung into the real world, and flounder. One of them stumbles upon a magical artifact that allows them to travel to alternate universes, and they go to a Narnia-esque world with no real plans for what to do.

The Narnia adventure and final showdown didn’t grab hold of me quite as much as the rest of the book. It felt like the tone did a one hundred and eighty degree turn from where it was originally. It didn’t feel tacked on, but the adventure-story aspect of the time in Narnia didn’t sit as well for me. It wasn’t as fascinating as watching this sad sack of a character fight to find meaning in a world that doesn’t fit him quite right.

The Harry Potter books are excellent, but they aren’t really meant for adults. The Magicians is written for adults who loved the Narnia books and Harry Potter books, but who have been slapped around a bit by the real world. I’m looking forward to getting hold of a copy of the follow-up, but I’m concerned that it all might take place in Narnia.

There’s no plot.  “Rich snobby white lady tries to hook up her boring friends” is not a plot.

Emma is at all times either boring, insufferable, or both.  The other characters put up with this for no reason that I could gather.

Women don’t get to have first names.  They’re all Miss XX or Mrs. John LastName.  I get that this is what happened in Jane Austen’s time, but I still don’t like it.

It took me over a month to read half of this book.  I didn’t read it cause I wanted to but because I felt like I had to.  I would force myself to read a couple of chapters a day.  I am not in high school.  Reading should not be torturous any more.

Seriously, this book needed a plot.  Or bears on roller skates.  There are too many awesome books in the world to use my time on something that doesn’t hold my interest.

Things I did like: 

I didn’t mind the writing style.  I would be willing to try another Jane Austen title in the future.

The problem is that when I hang out on the two with many of my friends, a trip to at least one bookstore its inevitable.  We’re not really shoppers, but we are all readers, and very good at egging each other on. I have no restraint in bookstores and usually come home with two or three books.  I don’t read these books as fast as I buy them and my TBR pile might hurt someone if it fell on them. To combat this, 2011 will be the year without bookstores.  I will not buy any new books.  Except at the Guelph public library book sale in October, cause seriously people, odds are I’m not going to make it until October anyways and it’s so awesome that it skipping it would be like missing out on sunshine.

In addition to not buying books, I’m also not going to be choosing books to read. I will be having you pick the books I read via the comments section. 

In about a week I will be posting my entire TBR list and I’ll be reading all comments about those books while preparing a short list. I’ll come up with the short list based off the suggestions you make.

I will pick a book based off your suggestions, and then when I’m done post a really rambling, probably not really book-related, book review for your blog reading enjoyment. Then it’s time to vote again. It’s the 2011 Bookstravaganza!

I’m pretty sure this means Courtney and Erin will be picking my books for me this year, and I’m mostly okay with that.

Sunday I relaxed and watched the rest of Being Human and other fun stuff like that. It was a great weekend, with the exception of not getting a damn thing done. Had to do laundry and groceries and all that last night, but it was totally worth it.

Pictures!

My second stop of the day was at a tourist information place. She told me how to get to the beach and what things were worth seeing that I hadn’t already circled. It was off to Inchydoney beach where I confirmed that the north Atlantic is indeed cold. I did stick my toes in the water but it was certainly short-lived.

I sat on a hill at the beach and read for about half an hour because that’s how I roll, and then I went to Drombeg stone circle which was totally cool. I spent maybe an hour there, trying to take cool pictures but the possibly French people who were there too were constantly in my frame which was totally obnoxious, so no good pictures from there.

Around two, I had lunch in the town of Skibbereen in a little pub down a crazy alley, and then took the scenic route back to Ballincollig. The highway has a great view of the castle, but I still can’t figure out how to get there on foot.

After Alan got off work last night, it was pub night, and we went out drinking with two of his colleagues. Today I hope to find a laundromat in the downtown Cork area, and finish up our plans for the weekend. Apparently it’s a long weekend here, so we’re hoping that extends to Alan, and he will be able to go touring around on Monday as well as on the weekend.

I’m in a bit of a rush, so no descriptions for the pictures.

Northern Ontario has a lot of rocks, and trees, and water. The drive was good — the major highways are in really good shape all the way up, and Kirkland Lake itself reminded me a lot of the town I went to high school in. I’m not a baby person, but Isaac is totally adorable and cute, and Lem and Brad are doing a great job with him. We were there Sunday night, and for Monday and Tuesday. We left early on Wednesday and were home before dark. I would not want to make the trip at night; it would be a mighty lonely trip.

I had a great time. We didn’t do a whole lot; pretty much just hung out with Isaac and Lemmers, watching TV and playing dumb Facebook games, but it was a nice change of pace. We went to the Kirkland Lake mall, toured the town, and Mom made a couple of batches of delicious cookies. On Tuesday night, Lem and I went for dinner and Mom took care of Issac, which was fun.

On the way home, I threatened to stop at all the silly roadside attractions (giant cows, buffalo, Muskoka chairs, etc) and historical plaques, but after our first attempt to locate a historical plaque failed, we gave up. We did however hit more than three bookstores and find some great butter tarts in Huntsville.

Picture time!

I don’t have any pictures of me with Isaac, but Lem does. Will steal some from her Facebook page later and post them here as proof that I will (sometimes) interact with babies.

We went back home to my folk’s place two weekends ago, and it was sitting on the couch for us when we got there. It’s absolutely beautiful.

I think we're going to have to get nicer bedding to match the quilt

another angle

If you can't see it, the detail in the boxes are squares, circles, stars and octagons

I’m so impressed that I made this. The finished product looks so different than when I last had my hands on it that it’s hard to believe it’s the same thing. I’m looking forward to getting more into the next quilt project, which is a blanket for Lem and Brad’s incoming Galaxar, who is due to show up in a couple of weeks. The quilt isn’t nearing anything ready to give away, I have two block completed, and bout 40 more to go, but it’s going to be absolutely amazing if this finished product is any indication.

I love curling up underneath the quilt and reading. Alan took a few pictures of that, but I don’t know how they turned out.

Butter tarts remind me like no inanimate object of my Grandma. She was the master. Grandma didn’t make a few butter tarts at a time, she made a few dozen. They were stored in the freezer in white margarine tubs, and they were full of sugary deliciousness. I’m sure each butter tart was about a thousand calories, but no family gathering was complete until there was a plate of butter tarts. I remember a few times being allowed to help with the making of Grandma’s butter tarts. She made her own pastry, and did not have a recipe to follow, except the one in her head. She would look into the batter from yards away and tell me it needed more corn syrup, or it didn’t have quite enough butter. It was crazy magic, and it was wonderful (my Mom can do the same thing). Because she would make these tarts dozens at a time, the act of making the tarts would take a full afternoon. Time spent waiting for the tarts to finish was often spent playing Mexican Rummy, a game that doesn’t even closely resemble the game rules I found on the Internets.

My Grandma passed away during the summer of my first year of university. From then on, we have never had butter tarts at a family gathering. The first year, we had butter tart squares but it was the end of the butter tart era. I am glad that I have these simply delicious, buttery awesome items with which to remember my Grandma. I think it’s cool that there is one thing in the world that will always remind me of her. There are other items in the world that remind me of other people, but I don’t think the connection is as strong as with my Grandma and butter tarts. Also, store bought butter tarts suck.

Happy Canada Day everybody.

More photos can be found on Alan’s Flickr Page.