Title: The Magician King
Author: Lev Grossman
Genre: Fiction
Year: 2011
Acquired: Library
Rating:

Review: The Magician King was a fucking awesome book.

Honestly, that’s all I really want to say about it… but of course that’s not a real review. But that is the gushing, giddy, and inarticulate assessment that I gave to the boyfriend when he asked what I thought of the book  the moment after I finished reading it on our Thanksgiving road trip.

The Magician King starts a few years after the concluding scenes of Grossman’s first book in the series, The Magicians. I don’t think there’s any way to read The Magician King without first reading The Magicians. In fact, you might even need to do a re-read first — Grossman doesn’t spend any time getting the reader caught up. If The Magician King hadn’t been so insanely awesome, that fact might bug me… but it doesn’t at all.

At the opening of The Magician King, our anti-hero Quentin Coldwater seems to have everything he ever wanted — he’s a magician king in the magical land of Fillory, a Narnia-like kingdom that Quentin has loved since his childhood. Two of his co-regents are fellow graduates of Brakebills, a secret magicians college that was featured heavily in The Magicians.

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Although the Sunday Salon is supposed to be all about reading, I’m afraid I’m not planning much reading time today. Instead, I’m hoping to spend today getting caught up on blogging — comments, reviews, and end of the year posts — so I can spend the read of the month actually reading and working on my Christmas craft projects.

My major goal for today is to get caught up on reviews. After finishing Here Is a Human Being by Misha Angrist this morning, I’m six reviews behind. That’s a doable number, if I don’t get too distracted watching football this afternoon. Here’s what I have left:

1. Mercury by Hope Larson
2. Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum
3. Page One edited by David Folkenflik
4. The Magician King by Lev Grossman
5. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
6. Here Is a Human Being by Misha Angrist

Any suggestions where to start?

If I manage to get through most of those, I’d also like to start working on a couple of “Best Reads in 2011” posts. I’m not going to do “Best Books if 2011” because I don’t think I read enough 2011 titles to make that interesting. So, the list will be my favorite books read this year, regardless of when they’re published. I started a “short list” that has 25 books, but I think I can trim that down a bit for the final posts.

I also have a couple of posts that I’m thinking about writing, inspired by some other bloggers. Earlier this week, Sheila (Book Journey) wrote about how she picks a special book for her first read of the year. I love that idea and want to do it myself, so I’ve been thinking about what book I might pick.

Meghan (Medieval Bookworm) wrote her Sunday Salon post today about the books she wanted to read in 2011 but didn’t quite get the time to read. At first I thought my list would be too long to write, but as I’ve been gazing at my shelves this afternoon I can see only a few that I’m feeling really sad that I didn’t make the time to read yet this year.

And then of course there are the rest of the “End of the Year” posts — looking back on goals from 2011, looking at my overall book stats from the year, and setting some goals for 2012. I’m a miserable goal maker, but I do love the exercise of thinking about where I hope to be reading and blogging-wise. I’m not going to work on those posts today, but the’re on my horizon for the end of the month.

And if I do get some time to read? I’m honestly not sure what I’ll grab. Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn, a book I’ve been curious about since it came out in March, just came for me at the library. I also grabbed Columbine by Dave Cullen while I was there, and that’s calling my name, as are What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes, and The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Glynis Ridley. Many choices, little time.

What are your reading/blogging plans today?

Off the Stacks is a weekly-ish feature where I highlight a nonfiction book I’m curious about but will probably run out of hours in the day to actually read. I’m hoping that by highlighting titles this way, I can encourage other people to give the book a try, and, if it’s great, consider nominating it later this year for the Indie Lit Awards. Consider these books stamped with the “Sophisticated Dorkiness Seal of Curious Approval.”

Title: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
Author: Mindy Kaling
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Nonfiction Type: Personal essays
Topics Covered: Immigrant childhood, feminism, comedy, television, entertainment, Hollywood, friendship, romance

What It’s About: Mindy Kaling is an Emmy-nominated author and actress on one of my favorite shows, The Office. She’s also a comedian, playwright, and astute observer of what it’s like to be a female in comedy in Hollywood.

Why I Want to Read It: I love The Office, and I love Kaling’s Twitter feed, which makes me think the book will be right up my alley. I’ve been disappointed by some books by young, female essayists (Sloan Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake let me down), but I get sense this will be more astute. I really liked some of what Kaling had to say in a recent piece she wrote for The New Yorker about chick flicks, which included gems like:

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

And since when does holding a job necessitate that a woman pull her hair back in a severe, tight bun? Do screenwriters think that loose hair makes it hard to concentrate?

Who Else Might Like It: Fans of Tina Fey or Nora Ephron, The Office fanatics, women in comedy, movie lovers

Reviews:

Over the 3.5 years I’ve been blogging, I’ve come up with a relatively consistent way of going about my blogging business. Even if I don’t do it all the time, I have some ideas about what are “best practices” for me in terms of when to write posts, how to write reviews, what books to accept and what books to ignore, and when to take a break from the “have to reads” and immerse myself in the “want to reads.”

This is not to say I’ve got the blogging thing figured out. Far from it, in fact. What it does mean, however, is that I have a good sense of how I operate and some ways to be at my blogging best (even if I don’t always do that…).

One area I continue to struggle with, however, is developing a “best practice” for responding to and leaving comments. I have a way of doing comments that I’ve developed, but recently it’s started to become overwhelming and I think I need a new plan.

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