Review: The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The second star is because the writing wasn’t awful and there were three or so lines that actually got me chuckling.

Otherwise, I hated this book. This is the first book I’ve so actively hated in a long time. Look, it’s even generated a review! So yay?

Now, it’s been sitting on my shelf since just after rode the first wave of popularity (meaning I found it at Costco). And when I first started, I suspected that my high-school self actually might have enjoyed it. Because my high-school self was a terrible, terrible person.

All of the characters are despicable, but especially the narrator Quentin. So whiny, pathetic and useless. I wanted to beat him. From first page to last he didn’t grow at all. Apparently, I’m supposed to believe he was depressed? He apparently started at seventeen and ended at, what, twenty-five? Even younger? He may as well have been fifteen.

Side note: one of my few Harry Potter favorite fan fictions gave one canon character and an OC depression. That story? It was beautiful, and heartbreaking. The characters didn’t go around why are you so depressed, you’re so depressed, look at me, being depressed.

But Quentin existed to waste space. All the female characters were barely characters and rather thin compared to the over-whelming male characters—and I’m not entirely sure what gave me this impression because numerically speaking the numbers were fairly even. But all the named women felt rather auxiliary.

I even hated the world-building. Fillory was just your generic anti-Narnia, and for that, rather inoffensive. Lame, but meh. But the “real world” just…just…I hated it, I hated all the magicans. These magicians can do approximately everything with magic (except, for plot reasons, body modification)—

— and now that I think about it, that’s especially odd to be so common a trope. You may not approve of plastic surgery, or foot binding, or any of the other things cultures have found attractive over the millennia, but it’s clearly been going on a while. Why is that the one thing magic can’t do. Hint: in this case, it’s a naked plot point.&8212;

—but for some reason, magicians in the “real world” do absolutely nothing practical. Well, the narrative mentions that some do, but mostly in a condescending sort of way that doesn’t seem like it’s ever accomplished anything at all.

Oh, and to be a wizard magician, you have to be genius-level smart…but if you never got an invitation, don’t worry, all magicians also have to be profoundly stupid in any useful kind of knowledge. So there’s that.

And the sort of geek-popular references: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Magritte.

I know in the reading I had other complaints, but thanks to this review and my rum-and-coke, I’m feeling pretty good at the moment and can let it go.

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Review: A False Sense of Well Being

A False Sense of Well Being by Jeanne Braselton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A well-written novel, with a strong first-person voice—unfortunately, not a voice I wanted to spend so much time with.

A False Sense of Well Being is a character driven novel in the traditional sense; the plot barely exists except as a framework for the emotional growth of the narrator. But, perhaps because this is a first-time author, it takes a good third of the book to even get to the authors main issue, and there’s lots of filler. The secondary characters are well-drawn and strong, but they obscure the main theme of the novel (to say more would be spoilers), and then it doesn’t get resolved, such as it is, until the last three pages. It’s too little time.

Basically, all that time wasted made me just want to smack the narrator upside the head (and perhaps it’s not the best sign that I can’t remember her name). It’s like…just grow up lady! She worries so much and so long about why she isn’t happy without figuring out what it would mean for her to be happy, or what her real issues are.

Jessie’s (there, I looked it up) story starts when she is 38 and dissatisfied with her marriage, or assumes she must be, because she keeps dreaming up ways for her husband to die. Not murder, just…accidents. To get away from the situation, she goes back home.

Note: she calls her suburban-Georgia town ‘small’, even though she apparently grew up in the Georgian sticks—which still has a mall? Having grown up in a true small town, anywhere with suburbs cannot be described as small. So.

Well, after many and varied rural adventures, such as they are, Jessie confronts her own misunderstandings of the past, but it isn’t until she makes it back to, at least, the same town as her husband where she understands her own difficulty—which, as I said, only happens in the very last pages. Now, she’s supposed to be some kind of social worker, so it was frustrating how little she could understand her own issues, especially when I saw it the moment it was mentioned.

It didn’t help that I could have little sympathy for her situation. After she married her husband, she went from the rural, small town girl, to joining her banker-husband’s upper-middle class social strata, where she worries about impressing the neighbors and being the perfect, conventional housewife. She has all this free time, but never gets herself any hobbies or does anything to define herself. I wanted to shake her: get a life! And stop worrying about being ‘happy’ in the drugged sense, unless you intend on drugging yourself. She probably should have gotten therapy, come to think about it.

Anyway, most of the primary characters in the novel are difficult to sympathize with, but especially Jessie. All of her interactions with Wanda McNab made me intensely uncomfortable, especially the way she framed her views, and her limp reaction to her secret (to say more would be spoilers) frustrated me.

Still, I’m glad I read it for all my complaints. She did get somewhere, eventually, and I did think the resolution worked for the novel. I just think it could have been a bit more streamlined; and while the descriptions were good, I still think it could have taken place just as well in someplace like the suburbs of southern California.

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2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Post postponed.

I went for a walk instead, under the full moon. It was almost directly overhead and cast a shadow from just over my left shoulder. My moon shadow.

In the middle of a field in the middle of a small town, it was still just me and the moon, and every time I broke the tether of that gaze, everything fell. From the sky to the earth, the line was more abrupt than ever before, and I couldn’t tell whether suddenly my brain had disengaged from all but my eyes, or maybe that I was too much a part of myself.

So the discombobulation is still strong. I think my journal got the best of my observations, but I’m avoiding light at the moment, except the screen, and I’d turn it off if I could.

And yet I should be writing my novel too. If only my brain hadn’t decided on sleep. 

Still, you should walk under the moon, in the quiet. If you have a space without the light pollution of cities. Much as I want to leave here, going back to the places without stars terrifies my at the most visceral. Even the dusk lingered, hours after sunset. O, but there are no words, even where there should be. 

I will never call myself a writer.

But starting Thursday, you’ll get my ideas. My opinions, let me show you them. Thursday.

Happy for Thanksgiving

Is it just me, or did everyone actually make the effort to be more pleasant this Thanksgiving dinner? True or not, I appreciated the difference.

Too stuffed for pie, but hopefully not for writing. Spending all day actually trying to interact with everyone wore me out and also left no time for writing, hence this late, short post, and also my need to hurry of and get my novel-ing done. But otherwise I’m nearly caught up on my quota, and even ahead on my reading. It’s just knitting that’s fallen behind this month.

Hope everyone else had so nice a day, even if it can only be considered so outside of the particulars.

But I do have to get writing, it’s so cozy in the room right now: a fire burning, sleeping cats and for once a very quiet house. I think I’ll take advantage. 

Books for Writers Who Read Books on Writing

NaNoWriMo: Word count for today: 31,578.

Today, I should be at 33,333, though I still have two hours. I have already typed some forty-five hundred words; I’ve discovered my writing music is Irish Pub Rock, as Pandora calls it. When listening, I believe I type faster, and of course the tempo encourages me to keep up the pacing, which I don’t think is my strength at the best of times. But on a roll I can get up to two thousand words an hour, which

Now, the Sims is still on my other computer, because I didn’t actually end my playing session before coming out to watch NCIS and spin-off, but I doubt I’ll want much more time. My current pixel family has four horses with one on the way, and they’re time consuming, even more than the game alone.

Anyway, in honor of NaNo, I thought I’d mention a few writing books I have and have read recently.

• The Writer’s Book of Matches Just a book of prompts, 1001, plus suggestions to modify them further. Most writer’s writers probably don’t need ideas, or so I hear. Ideas have never been my problem, at any rate. I get plenty. But my trouble is following through to the end. At best I get out slips of paper to jot down inspirations, collect them in any of a number of collector’s boxes. Sometimes I go so far as to write out a couple paragraphs, or even a scene. But finishing a story? The only time I’ve completed any fiction is through the two creative writing classes—and even then I often didn’t finish. But I’ve completed NaNo once, and I have crossed fingers for this year.

  Also, I have ideas for several genre-style fan fictions that I desperately want to complete. Mostly because my original writing tends to be about crazy people with mostly character development. Fan fiction on the other hand, demands more, because the readers already know the characters (except best case scenario, where someone discovers a new show after the fan story). Should be good for me. Goes hand-in-hand with the whole ‘complete’ problem too.

  Back to Matches. Personally, I found many of the suggestions to be rather tired, to be honest. Mostly genre—which, again, I don’t tend to write. But the appendix is helpful and just looking at someone else’s ideas can inspire your own. The Writer’s Book of Matches is put out by the Boiled Peanuts literary journal staff.

• Next, I’d like to recommend The Storyteller’s Art by Francis Porretto. It’s available free as an e-book, check on Goodreads. For the sake of full disclosure, I will say it’s taken from a collection of blog posts from a blog devoted to apparently conservative and Christian values. It’s not a blog I read, so if that’s what you do like, go ahead and look it up, though I can’t personally recommend it; but if it is something you don’t like, pick up the book alone, because this is a book strictly about the craft of telling a story: not the workmanship of grammar and spelling, not the selling of the final product. This book gives the reader a different way to think about their own writing, their work-in-progress.

  I admit, however horrified my creative writing teachers would be to hear it, I enjoyed the author’s emphasis that you should not be writing ‘literary fiction.’ It does sound as though he writes genre himself, but his advice—to think about your theme and resonance  to be concerned about character, to complete the story—applies to any kind of fiction, short of deliberately changing every rule in some post-modern goal. But like Picasso, you should know the rules before trying to break them. Some people might be put off by the constant reference to himself as the ‘curmudgeon’, so they might want to read the original blog posts, if they’re still available. Otherwise, I found this readable and motivating.

• I’ve read a few other free e-books on writing recently, but the only other one I’ll mention is Write Good or Die by Scott Nicholson. It’s also a collection of blog posts, but less well-formatted than The Storyteller’s Art. It’s also an anthology by several different authors on all parts of authorship, from the initial idea to publishing. Some are great, some had me looking at them sideways, but you may have the exact opposite reaction. With so many different perspectives, you’ll probably get something out of it. Even if you don’t, it’s free and you won’t even be out anything.

So if you like writing, I hope you’ll check them out. If you’re also in the middle of NaNo, well, you may want to look them up next year…or if you’re not waiting that long, at least until you’re finished whatever story you’re working on. Personally, I keep finding I’m much happier writing than I am when I’m not, but then I stop writing. Maybe this time will be different. I’ll keep writing best I can; maybe it’ll stick this time.

Great American Balderdash

Long day today: not just work, but the writer’s group and book discussion group meetings. Not to mention the approximately four thousand words I’m still behind for NaNo. But I have tomorrow and next week off, so I’d better use that time to catch up. It’s just so…stuck…at the moment. In the meantime, I’ve stumbled across a Huffington Post article all about the death of the novel. Well, when I say “I” stumbled across it, that’s something of a lie. I followed the link from Goodreads, because it’s safer for me for other people to do the online stumbling of things, because they seem to have better sources than I do, and I get little enough work done now as it is.

Anyway, back to the article. The author complains two major releases for the holiday season are both not that great and therefore our culture is no longer producing good novels. In fact, we should all just give up and go watch television, because what with technology and all, words aren’t important. Because “novel means new.”

Oh where to start with that argument. Well, first, the author made it for me with the referenced examples by Tom Wolfe and of all people John Grisham as “two of America’s greatest living novelists.” And that’s the crack in the foundation of his argument that takes it all down. All of the authors he names as ones who will be forgotten are the bestsellers: Rowling, Dan Brown. Even Wolfe, I’d say, falls more into the category of ‘good seller’ for the literary fiction side than actually fantastic fiction. Look, personally I have nothing against genre fiction, and in fact will argue passionately for its literary value. That doesn’t mean it’s a widely held critical opinion, by the people who actually get to make these decisions.

In other words, bestseller lists rarely coincide with literary value. If ever?

Just a few months ago, I read Literary Feuds, and in the chapter about Wolfe and Updike, the author made it clear  he wasn’t as impressed with Wolfe as Wolfe was with himself. There will always be differing opinions.

The article’s second thrust of the argument for turning to Twitter complained that only two books written after 1980 made it onto Modern Library’s list of 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. This is, of course, because out of the say 50,000 novels published every year in those two decades, we know for sure what will be read by future generations.

Maybe you don’t realize this, but they’ve always published books that won’t last. Austen herself responded almost directly to the gothic fiction of her day with Northanger Abbey. Ann Radcliff could probably be called the female Stephen King of gothic novels back in the day. How many have you read her today? And she’s mostly remembered for starting the movement, there were plenty of other writers catering to the more lurid tastes of young reads. If you don’t believe me, it’s much easier to find all the newspaper articles of the time lamenting the terrible tastes of the masses. Elitist  Sure. But we still do it today. There is no reason marks on paper should be any less entertaining and more educational than any television show or movie. In fact, given the much larger budgets and intellectual contributions, screen media should require much more from its audience.

So if it’s not required for Hollywood, why ask the poor, lone author starving in her garret to do so much more work, when maybe she just wants to tell you a fun story? Because of English teachers and Harold Bloom, mostly.

I’m not ready to switch to Twitter yet. Mostly because so few people actually tell stories there—they just want to link you to real ones. Poor Levin, who clearly isn’t reading for his own sake, although I’m not sure for whose sake he is reading. If he is. While he seems to despise genre fiction (despite called Grisham a great author) as much as any other literary critic, he never references some of the great work going on in the literary arena. An acknowledgement of genre bestsellers hardly convinces when he never mentions names like Ursula K. Le Guin, who I’ll read for fifty years at least, or Margaret Atwood. Not even Updike, Wolfe’s old rival. No non-American authors either. Of course, he explicitly asks for the Great American Novel, which is not a thing I believe actually exists…

But I haven’t written that post yet.

In the meantime, if you are waiting for the Great American Novel of the last few decades of the twentieth century, find about, oh, twenty more years worth of books to read while the critics duke it out, and by then the readers will be reading what is still worth reading. And you’ll be ready, because while you were waiting, you’ll have been reading all the Great Novels for the next couple decades before the critics have recognized them!

Enjoy, and I look forward to your reviews on GR (I’ll take a hint, sure).