CMB Crew Read Harder Philly Trip: July 2016

So Sunday was the official July meeting for the 2016 Book Riot Read Harder Challenge at Frankford Hall in Philadelphia, Pa. Usually I attend the local, unofficial, group at Cupboard Maker Books which is just down the road from me but this month I decided to step out of my comfort zone and join the group of folks from the local group who were heading to Philly for the Official group and boy am I glad I did.

We decided to get an early start so we could hit a local used book store on the way there and still have plenty of time to get to Frankford Hall for the 1pm group. Our first stop of the day was The Spiral Bookcase in Manayunk, PA.

While the shop itself is small the owner has managed to collect a very nice variety of books and has the best folklore/mythology section I've found in a long time. They also carry bookish buttons and bags as well as some more supernaturally themed things in the same room as their folklore section. They actually had a new copy of Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book which I snagged up since I've been wanting to read the multi-colored fairy books since I was a child. I also picked up a used copy of Joseph Campbell's Transformations of Myth Through Time and a Penguin Classics edition of The Mabinogion.

My total was more than $25 so I got one of the free gifts mentioned on the signboard outside, a mystery book! I was presented with a book wrapped in brown paper with a small blurb about the book written on it. When I unwrapped it I found that I had received an advance reading copy of This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison. Though not normally a book I would have chosen for myself I'm going to give it a shot since I'm trying to branch out this year.

Next on the day's agenda was the actual Read Harder group at Frankford Hall. I've never been to a beer garden before so this was new experience in and of itself for me. While I'm not really a beer drinker, okay so I never drink beer, I was able to find something right up my alley. They have alcoholic shakes in different flavors and the current seasonal flavor is berries and cream which is a flavor combo I love. I felt a little silly at first drinking a milkshake while everyone else was having beer but the whole group was just so congenial that it didn't become an issue.

There was a lot of great discussion of what everyone had read recently and were planning to read for various categories within the Challenge as well as some general pop-culture discussion and book recommendations. I was given a copy of Ready Player One when I mentioned that it had been recommended to me a few times and someone in the group was looking to re-home their copy. Score!

The last stop of the day before heading home was House of Our Own which has been running out of a Victorian house just off the University of Pennsylvania campus for 41 years now.

I have never seen so many books in one place in my life! Every possible surface has books on it including inside a pair of ornate wardrobe closets built into a wall and stacks on the steps up to the second floor; yes, the store takes up two whole stories. If you love the smell of books then this place will be a heaven for your nose as well as your passion for books. The majority of the books seem to be non-fiction in nature covering any and every topic you can imagine, but there is a whole hallway devoted to fiction and a small section of scifi/fantasy and children's/YA books.

I found more books here than I anticipated including The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, my choice for the Challenge Topic "Read the first book in a series by a person of color." I also picked up:

• The Discovery of King Arthur by Geoffrey Ashe
• Beowulf  Translated by Howell D. Chickering, Jr
• A Penguin Classics Edition of The Niebelungenlied
• Welsh Legends and Folk-Tales by Gwyn Jones
• Warriors: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter
• The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein
• That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
• All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane
• Choose Your Own Adventure #4 Space and Beyond by R.A. Mongomery
• Choose Your Own Adventure #22 Space Patrol by Julius Goodman
• Choose Your Own Adventure #38 Sabotage by Jay Leibold

Youthful Fantasy With a Mature Edge. Review: Lev Grossman's The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a child I was enchanted by C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, so much so that I wished I could find gateway into an enchanted world to escape my boring life here in plain old reality. Adventure, magic, talking animals, and the ability to make a real difference in the world all called to me from between the pages. Fast forward to 7th grade, my first year of High School and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone comes out and draws me once more into a world of magic and adventure with the twist that it isn't happening in another world but just along side the world we “Muggles” know. These two series have stayed with me over the years and have been old friends to turn to when times are tough. So when I started seeing recommendations for Lev Grossman's The Magicians mentioning that fans of these two series would find Fillory and Brakebills familiar in many ways I was at first skeptical of the quality of the story thinking it would turn out to be Harry Potter and Oh Look it's Narnia. I was delightfully wrong in that assumption.

I was surprised by how little detail is used to describe protagonist Quentin Coldwater's 5 years at Breakbills, yet it felt like I was there with him from the day of his acceptance test to the day of his graduation. More than Hogwarts in all of its grandiose detail ever did I felt Breakbills as a living place. The simple descriptions of the way the students interacted with each other and the school grounds felt like something I could have experienced while away at college myself, minus the magic of course.

Breakbills even has its own magical sport, Welters, which gives you the basic rules and then seems to go out of its way to become nearly incomprehensible even to the players themselves. Still the descriptions of the Welters matches (of which there are far fewer than Rowling's Quidditch) kept me enthalled without feeling like the book had become a sports story. Instead of feeling like a break in the action the Welters segments served to give greater insight into the characters and their relationships with each other, the school, and magic itself.

While the Fillory elements of the story draw heavily on the foundation laid by Lewis' Narnia it is its own world entirely and has plenty of nasty little surprises in store for both the characters and readers. Where Narnia, though conflicted, is primarily a realm of truth and beauty Fillory at first presents the same face before revealing a darker and more mature view of the realities of such a fantasy world. Not all creatures who offer help are all they seem and the reality of conflict is that not just the “bad guys” are hurt or even killed. This more than anything is what amazed me the most.

The Magicians is that rare thing, a fantasy story set in our own world as well as in another world with a maturity unlike anything else I've encountered in the genre. This is a world where not everything can be solved at the flick of a wand and, in fact, magic in many ways causes as many if not more problems than it solves. This is the story of that child I once was who longed to disappear into Narnia to escape her problems here learning that no matter how far away you may run, you always bring yourself with you. There's a very real reminder that war, no matter how it's dressed up, is a horrible thing and those who fight with you may not always get the happily ever after.

Quentin's journey from our mundane world to Breakbills and back to the mundane world could be a whole novel on its own in the hands of another writer, but Grossman uses this as the spring board for the deeper story of Quentin's journey from the mundane world to Fillory, the land he always dreamed of. The way that Grossman handles the question of what a Magician does once they've been trained and sent back to the “real” world parallels the dilemma faced by so many students upon graduation. “Well, I've got my degree. Now what?” What do you do when you can do practically anything?

Overall The Magicians was an amazing novel, hooking me right off the bat. I stayed up far later than I should've when I have work the next morning because I started this book before going to sleep one night because I was so enchanted by the world Lev Grossman was weaving. I haven't been this excited by a book in a long time and was sad to find that I had come to the end. The Magicians is book one of a Trilogy and I will definitely be picking up the remaining two titles The Magician King and The Magician's Land the next chance I get. I would most definitely recommend this book to anyone who has read and enjoyed C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series.