I’ve collected a few reviews of The Magicians by Lev Grossman for the meeting May 1, 2012.
The AV Club review from 2009 says “Grossman’s triumph is that he treats these magical worlds of childhood seriously.” And “everyone in The Magicians is capable of great damage and great kindness, but not everyone realizes it, and they expect the usual rules of fantasy fiction to swoop in and save the day.“
The NY Times book review (also from 2009) calls it a “magical world for adults.” I hope to discuss this with the group. Does this mean the “mature themes” like sleeping around, hurting those you love and “sloshing wine” for adults? This review also states that ““The Magicians” is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life.” [Anomie is social instability and social alienation. I had to look up the definition.] I disagree that other magic novels do not get into disappointment.
I think the magical world created in books “aimed” at younger readers like Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia resonate because they are timeless, ageless and universal. I feel like books about magic deal with the following themes: not fitting in, discovering a world where you excel but need to work on being accepted, learning who you are, who to trust, what you’re good at, who your parents are, what the world is like. JK Rowling did all that with humor and danger and thrills for all ages. And Harry Potter is dark as well as the Magicians.
I think there is a lot to discuss in this book about what works and what doesn’t work. I look forward to other’s opinions.
And finally, here’s a review of both The Magicians and its sequel The Magician’s King: http://belmontshore.patch.com/blog_posts/book-review-lev-grossman-works-magic
Thank you Beth for hosting the 14 January meeting, where we discussed Paul Auster’s Travels In The Scriptorium. Edeet collected a few articles about the book and Auster:
This review by Paul Kincaid in Strange Horizons discusses the two different Paul Auster writing styles and how this book is made of characters from other Auster novels. And this is a well written blog review describing the characters from other novels – Edeet found Moon Palace on page 45.
Here is the negative NY Times Sunday Book Review and the positive review from The Washington Post. And finally, some handy background information on the author himself.
The next meeting will be on 11 March to discuss The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Thank you Claire for hosting a wonderful discussion around the two editions of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.
A. E. Hotchner wrote a New York Times Op-Ed in July of this year about how he was with Hem when he discovered notebooks left at the Ritz in Paris with writings about the places, people and events of living in Paris in the 1920s. There is also an article from June describing the ‘recast’ edition.
Here is an article from the Atlantic and another about Mariel Hemingway optioning the rights for film & TV. There’s another movie about Hemingway and his work.
I apologize for the late posting but I want to post the links we used at the recent discussion of Robertson Davies “What’s Bred in the Bone.”
First, there’s this interview on the CBC Digital Archives where Robertson Davies discusses his career, his approach to writing and other things. After I listened to this interview, I thought that he based a few parts of “What’s Bred in the Bone” on his own life. The interview is about 1/2 hour long. At the very least, seeing what Mr. Davies looks like is worth clicking on the link!
As the story evolves with Francis Cornish’s life, there are a few paintings referenced in the story. Thanks to Wikipedia, we looked at the paintings Love Locked Out , Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time and The Wedding at Cana. There is also a recent article about a digital reproduction of ‘The Wedding at Cana’ along with some multi-media affects.
If you enjoyed reading this book, there’s the first book in the Cornish Trilogy, “The Rebel Angels.” I highly recommend The Deptford Trilogy – especially Fifth Business – Robertson Davies’ most famous trilogy.
And finally, today in the New York Times there is a story about the unlocking of the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians especially on 17th century painters. His memoirs describe how he spied for the Soviet Union. It reminded me of the character Francis Cornish but Mr. Blunt was spying against Britain instead of for it!
Have a great summer and happy reading! – Dalia
At the last meeting, I was asked if I would talk a little about poetry at the next meeting. I feel very self-conscious about trying to do this because some members may not be all that interested in contemporary poetry and I can’t imagine anything less interesting than hearing someone drone on about something I don’t really have any interest in – like ice hockey, for example. If any Makiokas started opening each meeting with a little talk about ice hockey I’d have to start being conspicuously late for every meeting. And also, I feel nervous about it because I’m a neophyte in the realm of poetry. I’ve only been seriously reading and writing it for about four years, and I think it’s the kind of thing you can do for decades and still only grasp a small sliver of – but I’ll try my best.
One reason I’m going to plunge ahead with this is because our upcoming book, Blind Assassin, presents such a good opportunity to talk a little about poetry that it seemed like a little bit of a sign. In addition to being a novelist, Margaret Atwood is also a poet, a well-regarded, award-winning poet. In fact, in keeping with the signs in favor of taking up this poetry discussion, I stumbled on her poetry collection, The Circle Game, the other day while I was looking through my shelves for something unrelated for a work assignment.
Unfortunately, Atwood is sort of a challenging poet and not really the easiest introduction to contemporary poetry. In fact, her work is a bit upsetting and difficult, abstract and full of some fairly savage imagery (this will be no surprise to anyone who has read or is reading Blind Assassin).
So I think it would be good to start by reading and thinking about this poem by Billy Collins (former Westchester County resident):
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html
I’ll read it at the next meeting. But essentially what Collins is getting at is that you don’t need to “understand” poetry to enjoy it. In fact, the moment you insist on pegging a precise meaning to a poem you run the risk of robbing it of its possibility. Poetry is really the attempt to say the unsayable. If you think of a novel as a representational painting, then a poem is an abstract painting. I’m oversimplifying, of course; there are accessible, narrative poems that do convey very precise meaning and there are novels, like our last book club book, The Maytrees (written by another poet/novelist), that are not meant to render any obvious meanings and do not have a real plot in any linear way and that you have to work at to gain meaning from or else you have to simply give up the quest for obvious meaning and just enjoy the journey – which some of us did and some of us did not – enjoy the book I mean. I will say most contemporary poetry is probably closer to The Maytrees than to a typical plot-driven novel, so if you hated that experience, the chances of you loving an afternoon curled up with a contemporary poetry collection are probably slim.
Anyway here’s Margaret Atwood reading some of her poetry:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=96#
And I’ll bring a poem that she does not recite at the URL above but that seems to me to cover some of the same ground as Blind Assassin to the next meeting.
- Lisa
I came across this blog post today:
http://profbw.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/academic-freedom-uhhh-is-that-like-group-think/
Essentially it seems that a high school teacher is being dismissed by a Watts, CA high school for assigning her students to read the scene from The Autobiography of Malcolm X where Shorty helps Malcolm conk his hair, a scene that came up in our discussion of the book last week.
Seems to me it’s one of the more benign scenes in the book and an appropriate one, I think, for a classroom of mostly African American and Latino children who are confronted daily with media images that do not necessarily affirm confidence in their own appearance.
Selfishly, I am in big trouble if public high schools are going to start forbidding such content in English and history classrooms, as the web site I edit is designed to be used by high school and college students studying African American, Latino and American Indian history and culture and has plenty of information about Malcolm X and other activists. If that content isn’t going to be allowed in the classroom, I guess I better think about updating my resume!
Some of you expressed interest in knowing more about my day job and I’ve included links to my projects below. The first is the home page of The American Mosaic, a subscription-based site that houses hundreds of books and thousands of primary documents on multiculutral topics, and the second is a blog focusing on Latino issues:
You can’t see much of the Mosaic without a subscription, but the blog is free and on the Mosaic you can read my essay on Slave Narratives (as Betsy informed us, early slave narratives played a large role in abolition and in the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
–Lisa
I came across this essay as I thought about the questions raised at our last meeting. It was helpful to me and I thought I’d pass it along.
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=dispatches-jewish-imagination
For the past 12 years, we’ve been meeting in Westchester, N.Y., Fairfield County, Conn., and New York City to talk about books. We’re a pretty diverse group of women: some married, some single; some mothers, some not; some gainfully employed, some home with kids, some transitioning one way or the other. Professionally, we are writers, editors, teachers, lawyers, and a designer.
We’ve been reading together for so long that we have dropped any attempt at choosing books democratically. We each get to choose a book for the group, no questions asked. But experience has shown us that contemporary fiction and classic literature lend themselves to the best discussions. We do read non-fiction, mostly memoirs, some biographies, but not as often.
Over time, we’ve dispensed with a lot of the social chit-chat about kids, school, husbands, work, sticking ever more closely to the text and the topics that spring directly from there: politics, religion, morality, gender, race, sex, culture.
All those years ago we started with Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters and, this coming week, we’ll be meeting to talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (And here’s our blog’s first plug: If you’re considering re-reading Stowe’s classic novel, take a look at Henry Louis Gates’s new annotated edition, which includes two provocative introductory essays and gives some context to the book’s many cringe-producing moments.)
