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Apr. 27th, 2015 09:08 amI finished Lev Grossman's The Magician King yesterday. As with The Magicians, I enjoyed the Harry Potter parts much more than I enjoyed the Narnia parts. I just don't care that much about Narnia. I was never the sort of child who imagined going through a portal to a fantasy world, and so those parts of The Magicians never really appealed to me. But Grossman's magic system and his meditations on education...
I love that in The Magicians, magic is really, really hard. Not just dangerous, though it is dangerous, but just plain difficult to achieve, requiring incredibly intense study as well as a genius for the theory. Some of the Brakebills passages reminded me very much of my engineering education. Grossman is brilliant at capturing the hours and hours of frustrating study and the satisfaction of the epiphanic realization that comes at the end of it.
The Magician King offers less of that, but Julia at the safe houses and then at Murs hit the same effect for me, the struggle to level up at magic by figuring out how to do these really difficult puzzles, in a self-taught way, and those were by far my favorite parts of The Magician King. But then after Level 250 there's a turn where the narrative shifts back toward Lewis, toward portal fantasy and the quasi-religious understructure of the Narnia mythos, and I felt a little betrayed by that. I liked that as Julia and her Murs cohort are about to complete their summoning ritual, she has a moment of realization that she doesn't actually want to summon an elder god, she just wants to be among friends working at the top of their brainpower to figure out how to summon an elder god. I was less happy with the way in which Grossman decided to punish her for having this realization too late.
Currently in the middle of Ancillary Sword. I am trying to remember I was not that seduced by Ancillary Justice until the confrontation between the Anaander Mianaais on Justice of Toren. Because it feels right now like Leckie is tediously trying to re-earn narrative capital she already earned in the first book, and I want more things to be happening.
I love that in The Magicians, magic is really, really hard. Not just dangerous, though it is dangerous, but just plain difficult to achieve, requiring incredibly intense study as well as a genius for the theory. Some of the Brakebills passages reminded me very much of my engineering education. Grossman is brilliant at capturing the hours and hours of frustrating study and the satisfaction of the epiphanic realization that comes at the end of it.
The Magician King offers less of that, but Julia at the safe houses and then at Murs hit the same effect for me, the struggle to level up at magic by figuring out how to do these really difficult puzzles, in a self-taught way, and those were by far my favorite parts of The Magician King. But then after Level 250 there's a turn where the narrative shifts back toward Lewis, toward portal fantasy and the quasi-religious understructure of the Narnia mythos, and I felt a little betrayed by that. I liked that as Julia and her Murs cohort are about to complete their summoning ritual, she has a moment of realization that she doesn't actually want to summon an elder god, she just wants to be among friends working at the top of their brainpower to figure out how to summon an elder god. I was less happy with the way in which Grossman decided to punish her for having this realization too late.
Currently in the middle of Ancillary Sword. I am trying to remember I was not that seduced by Ancillary Justice until the confrontation between the Anaander Mianaais on Justice of Toren. Because it feels right now like Leckie is tediously trying to re-earn narrative capital she already earned in the first book, and I want more things to be happening.