notanotherbookreview

Lev Grossman's Magicians (published by Viking in August) is a truly inspired book. The author of Codex has constructed a highly believable alternative world of magic and sorcery. We see it through the eyes of Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant, though a bit neurotic, high achieving, nerd from Brooklyn. He finds himself in a familiar situation, competing for an opening in a highly selective institution of higher learning, except he's never heard of it before, doesn't know how he got there, and people disappear from the crowded exam room. Quentin, a sensitive bookish young man, is miserable enough in his personal life and sufficiently intrigued to accept his admission way off the Ivy League track. And the work is challenging, tedious and fascinating, as he learns to transform into animals and travel between dimensions of time. Just as difficult are his peers, the incredibly talented and personally reticent Alice, Penny, aggressive with his mohawk and street creed, and the enigmat...

Like a Jane Austen novel you really want to read, says the flap copy quote for this NY Times bestseller by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith. That would be a fine anti-intellectual sentiment but for those of us who, pardon me, actually liked dipping into a long-vanished world of manners and nuances, precious in the good sense of the word as rare and valuable. The zombies are a cheap distraction and a trivializing of Jane Austen's world. Except there is, I think, something more clever going on here besides a clever take-off precious in the pejorative sense. You get the idea that the zombies somehow represent the dark repressed underside of British culture--the savage cannibalisitc force of empire underneath this formal society. It's a strange virus. One bite turns a living person dead and then they develop a lust for munching brains but can be fooled into attacking a cauliflower. Very funny also to see an Elizabeth and Darcy who are trained martial arts warriors--Elizabeth vowe...