Blue-Footed Musings

The Magician King by Lev Grossman, B+

I read The Magician King for three reasons: 1. I liked the first book in the series enough to want to continue reading about that fictional world, 2. I’ve been grooving on books with “magician” in the title lately (it’s a sort of reading theme for the year), and 3. I recently watched the TV adaptation of the series and enjoyed it.

While I also enjoyed reading The Magician King, I thought it was underdeveloped (spoilers ahead), which is especially noticeable when compared against the television adaptation. The main action of the novel–a quest to find the seven keys that are needed to keep magic from disappearing from the world–is handled better in the TV series. In the book, there’s a legend about the keys that is barely touched upon. The characters sail around randomly until they find the keys, only two of which require much effort to attain. In the TV series, there is a magical book that provides clues to finding the keys, each key requires its own mini quest, and each key has its own particular power. There’s a beautiful episode in which two characters grow old and die in their quest to find one of the keys. Kudos to the writers of the TV show for adding so much great detail.

The other focus of the novel is how one of the characters came into her magical powers and how her experiences, including a brutal rape, affected her. Her story in the TV show follows similar lines, but it too is handled better. In the book, the rape itself literally empowers her (i.e., gives her more magic). In the TV series, she earns the extra magic through her actions in the wake of that terrible experience. Big difference.

So, I expect that readers will find a lot that is interesting in The Magician King and be able to enjoy the book for that reason, while also feeling that it doesn’t quite live up to its potential. I will read the final book of the series (The Magician’s Land), but mostly to see how it differs from the TV show. As for the show, I recommend it to those who enjoy dark humor and don’t mind a little violence, gore, and debauchery.

I finished The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DeCamillo. Edward is a china rabbit doll that belongs to a little girl, Abilene. She loves him, but he doesn’t know how to love her back. Then she loses him at sea. He’s rescued, and then lost again, several times. During this “miraculous journey” he learns how to love the various people who find him and care for him. It’s a sweet little book, and a nice palate cleanser after Where the Red Fern Grows. The short chapters and beautiful illustrations would make The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane an excellent read-aloud book. Having finished it, I now have only 14 of the Top 100 Children’s Books left to read!

I also finished Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. Emily Wilde is a fairy scholar who travels to a small town in the far north to gather more material for the encylopedia that she’s writing. Part fantasy, part romance, totally enjoyable.

I had planned to read Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match by Sally Thorne next. In this ghoulish romance, Angelika Frankenstein worries that she’s not going to find the perfect mate. Being a Frankenstein, she has it within her power to literally create the man of her dreams, so she goes to the morgue and starts looking for the perfect body parts. That’s as far as I got into the story. There were a lot of crude references to the male anatomy in the morgue scene. That wasn’t a deal breaker, but it did suggest that I ought to check the reviews before getting too far into the book. The reviews were not promising. I decided to return the book to the library without finishing it. So I’m not sure what I’m going to read next. I guess it will depend on what seems appealing later today.

• It absolutely boggles my mind that I have almost 17 years of my reading history listed on this blog. The blog simply seemed like a fun thing to do back in 2007. Who would have imagined I’d keep it alive for so long? And it’s awesome to have so much reading history. If only I could convince myself to write a review for each book, like I used to . . .
• Last year, Marshall saw me add a book to my “Books Read in 2022” list, and he asked, “Why are you adding the book to the middle of the list?” I explained to him that the list was in alphabetical order by title. But it occurred to me then that I’d like to try something different, so this year I’ve been keeping my list in chronological order. It’s simpler, and I can always revert to alphabetical order if I want to.
• I know it seems like I grade books willy-nilly, but I do have my own sort of reasoning behind it, as I remind myself. An A-grade book is one that I really liked, would consider keeping on my shelves, and would probably recommend to others. A B-grade book is one that I don’t want to keep and probably would not recommend, but that I liked enough not to consider it a waste of my time. A C-grade book is borderline unreadable. Anything below C is a fail.

I finished two books this week.

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, C-: I gave this book a low grade not because it’s unreadable. The prose flows smoothly, making the book an easy read in that respect, and it’s the only reason the grade is as high as it is. The story is the problem. Quick synopsis: a boy in the Ozarks trains his two dogs to hunt raccoons; violence and death ensue. This story is everything that’s gross about human nature. Plus, heads-up: it’s about dogs, so you already know how it’s going to end. The only bright side is that by then you may have hardened your heart enough not to care. My sympathies to every schoolchild forced to read this trauma-inducing tale of selfishness, obsessive stupidity, religious indoctrination, environmental destruction, violence, and animal cruelty.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King, B-: I like Stephen King’s everyman writing style and his passion for the “what if,” which is why I read his books, even though I don’t particularly like horror novels. Fairy Tale is not his best effort. The protagonist is Charlie, a 17-year-old boy who acts more like a 70-year-old man and consequently never rings true. After a painfully slow start during which he saves an old man’s life and falls in love with the guy’s elderly dog, Charlie travels, via a stairway hidden under the old man’s shed, to a fairy-tale land called Empis. His goal is to get to a magic wheel that, like Bradbury’s famous merry-go-round, has the power to make a person (or in this case, a dog) young again. The wheel is located in the middle of a city that has been overrun by evil, so the journey is a perilous one. King draws parallels between his story and the collective fantasy/fairy tales of our culture–stories by authors such as Bradbury, L. Frank Baum, and Lovecraft, as well as older tales, like “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Goose Girl”–but I wasn’t feeling it. Empis is a horrible, cursed land, where the people are turning gray, deformed, losing their powers of speech, sight, and hearing. I felt no joy in being there, only relief in leaving. There were enough interesting things in the story to eke out a B-level grade, but overall I didn’t like it, and I will be putting the book in the donation pile.