This is two times, now I can call it a tradition right?

December's pick is:

Lev Grossman

>The Magician's Trilogy
The Magicians
The Magician King
The Magician's Land

>Stand alone
Warp
Codex

Note that I've not read Warp or Codex (And by all accounts, including the author's, Warp isn't worth reading) so the rest of this post only pertains to The Magician's Trilogy, which certainly need to be read in order (Though each stands alone).

I'm going to make a disclaimer before we get properly started. This is adult stuff with adult themes. It is very much rated R for lack of a better comparison. You've been warned. Awful things happen to people and people do awful things. You will never look at foxes the same away again.

The Magician's Trilogy has been described as "Grown up Harry Potter". That's not really fair. It is set in "the real world" where the main character finds out he can do magic and goes to a college to learn to be a magician. That's about the end of the similarity.

The Magicians is a book you're either going to love or hate. So far as I can tell there's very little in between. Go look at the Amazon reviews, there's tons of 5 star reviews... and tons of 1 star. I happen to love the book, but I'm not surprised so many people hate it. It is not a happy book. The protagonist is not terribly likable. Intentionally so. It is a story about profoundly gifted people making terrible choices and squandering their talents and being unable to accept their own faults. This is not the hero's journey.

The first half of the book, in particular, hit very close to home in a way very few books have. The second half of the book, and large swaths of the next two, are focused much more on Fillory (Which is essentially Narnia) while keeping up a lot of the darker, pessimistic tones. I enjoyed all of it, but nothing touched me so much as the first half of The Magicians.

Since this only the second time I've done this, I'm still figuring out the best way to approach it. Should I include brief summaries of what the books are about? That information is out there once you have the author's name/book title, so I don't see much point in including it so I'm trying to focus more on general themes and why I, specifically, recommend them and will follow the thread to add any extra thoughts or information people may want.

Much like last time, I encourage discussion here but since we don't have very good anti-spoiler technology try and keep that out of the thread. If someone really wants to go there in the discussion we can start up a spoiler filled thread.

-Raesh

"In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse." ― Lev Grossman, The Magicians