Halfway home
“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
—Lev Grossman in The Magician’s Land
Quentin Makepeace Coldwater is my favorite character in all of the written word. I have read The Magicians trilogy an embarrassing number of times—I have read all three novels in their entirety no fewer than fourteen times. I’ve read most of The Magicians, the first book, many more times than that. (Don’t judge—how many times have you re-watched an episode of Friends? This is my version that. My literary The Office, if you will.)
George R.R. Martin famously said, “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea . . . dark and dangerous and full of twists.”
In The Magicians, we meet Quentin at his teenage angst-iest moment. He’s the ultimate nerd—an IQ too high for his own good, nerd friends, nerd habits, nerd hobbies. His ultimate nerd hobby is his obsession with the children’s fantasy series Fillory and Further. In The Magician King, Quentin and his cohorts get to live out their fantasies but of course there is always a price to pay. In The Magician’s Land, Grossman serves up the singularly most satisfying end to a series I’ve ever read.
If you’re looking to mainline magic, this is the series for you. I handsold more than one hundred copies of these books in five years at B&N in Tulsa. We kept track.
These novels, over time, have become my happy place. In the same way Quentin aches for Fillory, I have long ached for Brakebills. Iykyk. If you don’t know, might I suggest you read these books.
As for Grossman, I hope it goes without saying I’m a fan.
How much of a fan? A friend at work pulled my name in our Secret Santa gift exchange. And then he went way, way above and beyond.
The first thing he did was to find Lev Grossman’s email. He wrote to my favorite author to tell him that I’d chosen my pen name after his main character Quentin Coldwater. Grossman wrote back wishing Jennifer—”I imagine that isn’t her real name”—happy holidays! Then my friend tracked down a signed copy of Silver Arrow for me.
While fanfiction has never been my drug of choice, I appreciate it. And I think Grossman does too.
“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
― Lev Grossman
