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...

A lot of people have been touched by Joan Didion's award-winning memoir of the year she coped not just with her husband's sudden death from massive cardiac arrest but her daughter's hospitalization for a flu that became a life threatening systemic infection. Though riveted by the author's minute self-observation of her precarious and shift states of mind, I also found it excruciating. Didion describes herself as a person unafraid of facts, who likes to be "right" and now finds herself in a situation where she is fibbing to herself. And she's courageously aware of her own coping mechanisms and their craziness, while she's invested in believing them. Of course that is the stance of many of Didion's fictional heroines, who pride themselves on not succumbing to self-deception. In Play it as it Lays, the fictional heroine's gimlet eye is deeply ironic and as seductive as Chandler's Marlowe. In The Year of Magical Thinking, that character ha...

Thursday, March 15, 2007 Ines of My Soul, Isabel Allende published by Harper Collins From a provincial village in Spain, where young Ines marries her lover to avoid servitude to her grandfather, to Peru and Chile, where she joins conquistadors to carve empires from the jungle, this is an exciting read. Based on the life of Ines Suarez, Allende's imagination makes history come to life. When her husband abandons her to search for gold in Peru, Ines decides to follow her own inclination for adventure in the New World. Working as a seamstress, cooking empanadas, and gaining doctoring skills, she pays her way and fate leads her to the future governor of Chile, the military genius responsible for the victory of the Spainards over the Indian tribes. She's with him until, like Pisarro, he succumbs to the corruption of power, including atrocities to the Indians. Ines' honesty is searing. She sees through the hypocrisies of the church, the intrigues of kings and governors, the civil...