Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Voyage of the Dawn Treader, whoops, I mean Muntjac.

The Magician King (The Magicians, #2) by Lev Grossman

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Now I’m remembering why this was only four stars. What was otherwise a clever play on Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader had the oomph taken out of its sails (heh) by a completely unnecessary SPOILERS rape scene at the end END SPOILERS. More on this in a bit. Quentin is still having his identity crisis all over the place in this one, but he’s much less obnoxious about it here than in the first book. The real centerpiece of this book is Julia, as we […]

400 Pages of I Just Can’t Even

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I never liked Holden Caulfield.  Crucify me if you must, but I did make the mistake of reading Catcher in the Rye as an adult, with adult sense and sensibilities.  So I was really not sympathetic to Holden Caulfield at Hogwarts and I’m certainly not taking Holden Caulfield’s shit in Narnia either. Quentin (the Holdeness of all Caulfields) and his band of self-adsorbed fellow magicians now reign in Fillory (it really is Narnia adjacent) as self-adsorbed despots.  Grossman loves to play with genres and tropes, but I […]

C’mon, Luv. Let’s Go Do Druggy Sex Magic!

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[Sound the Second Novel Alarm! Spoilers for The Magicians ahead.  I mean it this time.] The Magicians was an exercise in literary frustration for me.  I loved it.  It was wonderful.  Its adherence to explaining away its every mystery absolutely infuriated me.  Reading it a second time allowed me to be well aware that the breathtakingly horrific things that occurred in the unfurling of Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel cioppino would not remain the unexplainable night terrors of a magical world beyond our reckoning and to simply enjoy the […]



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