"Gotta get my quidditch costume..."

Whew, thought I would never get through the first half of the book. But, like Quentin trudging through Antarctica, I made it. Just kidding, it wasn’t so awful. Especially since I was reading it in Graham Memorial and kept imagining I was at Brakebills. If you’re having trouble getting into the book, I highly recommend you try that relocation.

Anyway, moving on, I’m still not in love with this novel, but I think I’ve nailed down why. I can’t throw myself into a story line I don’t particularly feel a part of, if that makes any sense. For example, in The Hunger Games, Collins writes the story so that we, as readers, feel like we are a part of it. We are invested in Katniss’s life and possibly impending death, so we keep reading to protect her (so to speak) and ease our minds. In The Magicians, though, I feel like Grossman writes from a very severely third-person perspective, where we aren’t so much flies on the wall but watching through a security camera, completely removed from the environment and, to some degree, context. This is demonstrated pretty clearly when Grossman writes that days, weeks, and even many months pass without any remark. “Six months later and…” doesn’t give the reader any real insight and, personally, I felt pretty left out. I get that he needed to move the plot along and make Quentin a fourth year, but I’m not sure I like that approach. Maybe I just got spoiled with Harry Potter, where we follow the gang for one year in each book. It’s been a while since I read that series, but I don’t recall Rowling ever writing “Six months later and Harry was still kind of mopey and Ron still had red hair.” I like being in the action with characters, even if that means being a bit boring sometimes.

Oh, and the title is a reference to my favorite quote so far: “Gotta get my quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean welters.” – Josh

Magically Indifferent

So basically what I’ve gleaned from everyone’s blog posts is that after 47 pages no one is quite sure what to think about this book other than it’s kind of like Harry Potter. But then you could tell that just by reading the reviews, in which everyone made at least one reference to the master of witchcraft and wizardry. Personally, I think don’t care one way or another for the novel so far.

One thing that we’ve discussed that makes a novel “popular” is creating compelling characters that you care about from the first page (read: Katniss). Grossman failed to do this, in my opinion. Instead of creating a character that was likeable or compelling, he created one we felt sorry for. Poor pitiful Quentin and his unrequited love and his fondness for doing magic tricks where no one could see them. Oh and his parents don’t care about him? Bonus. To be fair, though, I didn’t really get attached to Jacob (was that his name?) or Julia, either, and I’m pretty sure we were supposed to like them. Either way, even when Quentin’s wildest dreams come true and he finally gets to live in a fantasy world I couldn’t muster up enthusiasm for him. I was and am purely indifferent. I was more excited for the punk kid I know nothing about.

Another trend I noticed, though it’s less prominent or significant so far in this book, was the whole “you have to have a dead person,” thing. There was a dead body within the first twenty pages, I think. What is it about our attention span that makes it necessary to have a corpse so quickly in every book we read? I am, however, intrigued about the whole “scouts” thing, where the magic school sends out recruiters that appear to be normal, apparently attractive people.

Anyone else hoping this turns out to either be a drug trip or psychotic breakdown?

Coming back for seconds

At the beginning of this semester, I saw a Facebook status in which one of my friends said, "Ugh, why didn't I discover Hunger Games over break when I actually had time to read," or something to that effect. I sympathized, being one of those people who gets easily caught up in books, but couldn't quite empathize, since I had no idea what the Hunger Games was about. Now I get it.

Not only is this a thrilling book full of action, adventure, and romance, it’s incredibly well paced so it keeps you flipping pages until the very end. Just when I assumed the drama was over and we could get on with the boring post-games, happy ending roundup, the conflict built even more. I suppose that’s one good thing about it being part of a series instead of an independent novel—not everything had to be resolved simply. There are still a lot of unknowns where the character of Katniss is concerned, though we get a conclusion on the Games themselves. I like the whole not-knowing-everything ending to a book, especially when there’s a possibility that the next book in the series will provide answers and hopefully even more questions.

As I considered reading the next book (and I will as soon as exams are over), I couldn’t help but make a mental list of things I wanted to see more of or know more about. I hope there is a lot more where the capital/district dynamic is involved. While the Games set an excellent stage for this battle in the first book, I want to see some sort of justice be had there by District 12. I want more history on the country, more details on the rebellion. I’d like to get to know Gale a little better, since he was included but barely present in book one. And of course, because I’m into clichés and all that, I can’t wait to see where this whole Katniss/Peeta thing goes. Ahh, love in the midst of really, really awful reality.

Spoiler-filled. Beware.

Well that was certainly, um, interesting. I feel like despite the fact that I finished the novel, I'm still very unsure as to what it really meant. I get what happened on the surface, but I really hope the discussions tomorrow will unveil a little more, since I feel sort of empty about the whole thing. That being sad, I really liked the concept and the challenges it presented in trying to figure out the plot and upcoming twists.

I think my favorite part of the end was that because (spoiler alert) Orciny didn’t actually exist, it was a little more plausible/applicable to my life in a unified country. It wasn’t that some crazy, mystical, unseen group was controlling everything—it was just selfish people like the ones that exist everywhere. It’s far more interesting, to me, to read about people that are familiar to me than people that are foreign (in the sense that they’re “unseen” like a secret society would be here). The dynamics of understanding why someone more like myself than the unseen “other” would do this type of thing made the conclusion more interesting and perhaps more relevant to me.

This reminded me a lot of Dan Brown’s novels, most specifically Angels & Demons. In the same way Bowden, Buric, and the others use Orciny as a veil for their crimes in tC&tC, the criminals in A&D use the ancient Illuminati and pin their actions on a nonexistent organization. It makes for a compelling plot, I think, because not only is the reader asking him or herself, “Who is committing all these crimes and why?” but also, “Does the organization I’m possibly attributing them to even exist in the first place?” There’s a double uncertainty that adds to the suspense of a mystery novel.

That being said, my favorite part about tC&tC wasn’t the murder mystery aspect at all, but imagining life as a citizen of Beszel or Ul Qoma. There is so much nuance in this fake city that I couldn’t help constantly picturing myself there, which led to a lot of interesting questions even past the classic, “Whodunit?”

The Campus & The Campus

“I lived east and south and bit of the Old Town...It was a heavily crosshatched street--clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house-by-house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besz juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation”

Like the two towns in the novel, Chapel Hill has several buildings that appear to be from completely different areas. In this photo, you see an old house juxtaposed with a brand new, modern looking building. It almost seems as if the newer architect completely disregarded the surrounding buildings, yielding the result of “crosshatching” at various points on campus.

This compares to the two cities in the novel, in that the architects there literally disregarded all surroundings and “unsaw” the previous buildings, resulting in an awkward skyline.

To state the obvious, the situation is very different in that Chapel Hill is not “two cities” but one city that has poor planning and is constantly under construction.

The Good Kind of Confused

Wait so this isn't a Sex & the City spinoff?

Kidding. But even if I hadn't been joking around this post would have mostly likely started, ended, and been almost totally made up by question marks. Though we were warned in class that this book would be confusing at first, I wasn't quite prepared for what I read.

The most helpful thing I've read thus far, in relation to trying to understand the "concept" of two cities existing in the same place (maybe? I'm not even sure yet if that's right.) was the quote on the back cover of the book.

"...Skillfully examines the illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities" (from Publishers Weekly, apparently).

So my theory as the concept is that the two warring cities are a metaphor for different parts of society, namely the upper and lower classes. Just as the people of Beszel “unsee” or avoid looking at Ul Qoma even though it’s visible, people of the higher class avoid looking at the seedier parts of any town (though I was mostly thinking about big cities having upscale parts and ghettos) despite the fact that they could, if they wanted to. If you look at cities like New York, it’s sometimes tempting to see Harlem as a totally different city than, say, 5th Avenue.

The whole being in the same place physically trips me up a bit, as I’m sure it was intended to. My brain can’t process that in one spot there could be two different spaces. Is that even right? The terminology of crosshatches, alters, etc throws me off quite a bit.

Does this remind anyone else of 1984 a little bit? Though it isn’t technically dystopian, Beszel seems pretty shady and undesirable, and the whole “unseeing” phenomenon reminds me a lot of the concept of doublespeak, where you say (or see) something but never really acknowledge it or process it. Either way, little bit mind blowing.

"Then again, he also made himself look like a ruthless murderer."

I was so caught off guard by the ending of House Rules that I literally passed out, hit my head on a coffee table, and woke up to my roommate dragging me out to the woods trying to set up a crime scene with what he supposed was my lifeless body. Just kidding, I figured out what happened like halfway through the book and trudged along until the end.

To be fair, though, I couldn't quite predict how the truth would come out, since apparently Emma and Oliver were dead set on never letting Jacob explain himself. I assumed they would go to court once the jury had decided on a verdict and Theo would confess to everything right before they announced it. What I didn't realize until the end, though, was that Theo still kind of assumed Jacob killed her despite the fact that he saw her fall and knew she didn't keep running after him. That seems silly and implausible to me, but so does the fact that Oliver and Emma live happily ever after despite the fact that they've only known each other for a month and only in a really, really weird context. But I digress.

I agree with what a few people said in class—that it was an interesting perspective on Asperger’s, but the rants on how the syndrome is entirely caused by vaccines just threw any credibility it had out the door for me. There is little to no scientific evidence that vaccines have any effect on autism in children. That was a rumor that actually started, I think, in England and spread like wildfire thanks to the internet. I just think it was quite silly of her to bring it up and turn what could have been a convincing narrative from the point of view of someone with Asperger’s into something that seemed like a weak lobbying attempt.

Anyway, I really wish that with this, my final entry on the book, I could write something deep and expository, something other than a reaction. But honestly I can’t find much to say other than it was fairly entertaining up until the last 150 pages or so.