Books I Loathed discussion

I'm 85% done with The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and only inertia and a suspectedly vain hope that it will get better or close well is keeping me going.

I read it hoping that it would be a literary Harry Potter, (and it can be described as "Harry Potter Goes to College And Does Everything That People Do In College") because Grossman is a writer for Time Magazine and "has written for The New York Times, Salon.com, Lingua Franca, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. He has served as a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and as the chair of the Fiction Awards Panel." (From Wikipedia.) So I had high hopes.

I'll update this when I'm done, but jeez. The plot is episodic rather than cause->effect. The characters are formulaically "complex." (There's a formula to making characters seem "complex." Grossman knows it and used it, shallowly and simply.) I'm so sad. I really wanted to like this book.

What do you expect from a guy who (also from Wikipedia) "In response to his novel Warp receiving largely negative customer reviews, he submitted fake reviews to Amazon using false names. He then recounted these actions in an essay titled "Terrors of the Amazon"."

I think the great reviews are entirely because he's a member of the literati establishment and he knows all these other fiction reviewers, so they hyped his book onto the NYT bestseller list. I feel cheated out of $10.

Like I said, will update when I hit the end.

TK Kenyon

And don't get me wrong: I love Harry Potter.

I just finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and I hated it in every way. It's terribly written. Every conceivable flaw of plot or character is fully present. This was a book that I did not wish to toss aside lightly nor throw it with great force: I wanted to cut this book's head off, douse it's severed head with gasoline, and set it on fire. As an author, this book offends me with its very existence for it is wrong on so many levels.

I have never asked for my money back when I've hated a book before, and I've read many thousands of books, probably over 20,000 in my life, especially if you count the repeats as separate book attempts. (I've read Orlando by V Woolf at least 15x, Lolita by V Nabokov at least 10x, and each of Shakespeare's plays at least 2x, some 5-10x, and read some other masterworks multiple times, too.) I certainly would not ask for my money back for such a book as American Psycho by BE Ellis, for while that was a wincing, uncomfortable read, it succeeded on many, many levels and was a brilliant, creative, deeply imagined book, although I don't think I would ever read it again.

I've never asked for my money back after seeing a movie, not even after Highlander 2 which, in my opinion, narrowly edges out Grease 2 and Staying Alive (Saturday Night Fever 2) as the worst movie, ever.

This book was an epic, tragic fail. Tactically, the only change in my emotions was annoyance at the main character, who was a whiney rich kid who could do magic. Strategically, this book did nothing to elucidate the human condition and forge the consciousness of our race (the human race, a paraphrase of James Joyce.)

This book is, at best, about white people's problems (a paraphrase of Tyler Perry, who is right about so many things on, again, so many levels.) This book considers ennui to be The Great Satan.

Plotwise, there wasn't even a good cause->effect plot. The "plotline" was episodic, in that a thing happened, and the characters reacted to it as best they could with their stunted emotions and absent maturity, and then it kind of petered out, and then another, unrelated thing happened, and the characters repeated.

Grossman evidently has learned the formula for creating "complex" characters, which is easy: you have them want one thing, and then when it or the opposite happens, they feel the opposite of what they expected. His characters do that, superficially and unconvincingly. Someone told him the formula and he scribbled it onto these ... (not cardboard; cardboard is stiff, resilient, and has three layers) ... onion-skin typing paper characters.

I don't want this trash polluting my Kindle or my Kindle account. So I asked for my money back, something I have never, ever done before. I have never asked for my money back for a book or a movie or whatever.

I'm so middle-class that it does indeed seem "tacky" to admit that I am not so rich that I can squander money on trash.

And, interestingly, I feel differently about asking for my money back for a Kindle purchase rather than for a dead tree book. With a DTB, I feel that I received something, some wood pulp fiber and glue, in exchange for my money, at least suitable for use in a rural outhouse. With the ebook, I feel that what I received was pure intellectual property, and this intellectual property was really, really bad, and I think that the professional reviews were nothing short of fraud.

Why don't I just give it a scathing review and be done with it? Because Grossman is deep inside the literati mob (See wikipedia clip above,) and if I wrote the review that I would dearly, dearly love to, he might get his cronies to sabotage the reviews of my next novel, whenever that is, because he does read his reviews. He created fake Amazon accounts to game reviews (he wrote 5-star squees) of his previous novels because it got so many bad reviews. He admits so in a nasty essay about Amazon reviewers titled "Terrors of Amazon," where he was really snotty about amateur reviewers.

He obviously must have pressured professional reviewers to give this novel good reviews, or else spiked the punch at his book release party with LSD.


Why did I read all the way to the end? Because it got such great reviews from the professional reviewers that I thought, perhaps, it had a sagging middle and maybe he'd pull it off in the end. Maybe he was winding up for a huge pitch. It happens. I've read quite a few books where I thought the middle was a bit hopeless, but the last 25% got really good.

By the time I hit 90%, it was like watching a 50-car pile-up on the interstate. I couldn't believe the extent of the devastation.

I didn't ask for my money back because I didn't *like* the book. That book was badly written. There have been many books that I didn't like that I recognize are very good or brilliant books.

American Psycho was one. I didn't like that book at all, but it was deeply imagined, thoughtfully crafted, and well-written, and quite honestly, I don't think BE Ellis wanted you to like it. (At least, I hope not.)

Pnin by Nabokov was another. I didn't like it, but it was still a beautifully written book, and I admired what Nabokov did with it.

Several of Palahniuk's short stories (the one where the baby's arm is torn off, the one where the baby is scalded by boiling water, the one where the guy's intestines are sucked out by the pool vacuum through his anus) come to mind. They're excellent, wonderfully written, and they definitely succeed on the tactical level by creating an emotional change in the reader, but I didn't like them.

The Corrections by Franzen hit every one of my personal pet peeves, from "Tyler Perry's White People's Problems" to "Writers Writing About Being Writers" to "English Professor Screwing the Hot Grad Student Who Then Blackmails Him and Whining About It" to "Huge Underlying Problem = Emotionally Unavailable Father And That's All" to "Pissing on One's Characters From A Great Height," not to mention "Desperately Needed an Editor To Whack 25% of the Words," but it was still deeply imagined, had cause->effect plotting, and masterful language.

Conversely, there are many books that I enjoyed that probably won't be around 400 years from now and certainly won't win (or at least deserve) any prizes. But I like 'em anyway and I'll keep buying the next one as long as the author puts 'em out.

There is a deep difference between personal taste and literary merit, and yes, I think I can separate the two.

This book got glowing reviews from professional sources, and it was on the NYT bestseller list.

The reviews, IMHO, are fraudulent. This guy got his buddies to write squees to put his book on the bestseller list. I got suckered. This, IMHO, was a product that didn't match the description on the box.

I do think that the Kindleness has something to do with my wanting to return it, and we all know that the ebook experience is different than that of Dead Tree Books, so here goes:

1) The Kindle ebook I returned was in perfect mint condition, no dog-eared pages, no coffee stains, unbroken spine, so it will be resold as "new," in that it will go back into the infinite pile of elections that makes up the ebookiverse, so I don't feel that I "used it up" or returned something that is "used" and so cannot be resold as "new." IRL, I *might* try to return a book I hated so much if it were in perfect, re-sellable condition.

2) If it was a DTB, I might have sold it to a used book store and thus recouped part of my loss. Can't do that with a Kindle ebook.

3) Amazon itself says that you don't "own" the book; you buy a licence to utilize the intellectual property. Likewise, I have asked for my money back for defective software that I also blew off my computer (McAfee Anti-Virus when, after 8 years of paying them for an annual licence and using it according to the directions, my computer got infected with a trojan and they would not help me but only asked for more money for a different product to help me where the first one failed, and I've been happily using AVG ever since. Cheaper, too.)

4) Again, I think the professional reviews were fraudulent and were probably quid pro quo. In that, the book was not as advertised.

Thank you for reading my rant. *The Magicians* is the first book I've loathed in a long time. I think it's the worst book I've ever read.

TK Kenyon

And, in comparing it to Harry Potter:

HP had a lot of strengths: great plotting, great theme, used the *Hero with 1000 Faces* theory to great effect, to name only a few.

Everything that HP did well, Magicians did the opposite, and thus screwed it up.

TK Kenyon

Dude, totally agree with you. I hated The Magicians so much. I was practically reading the last 3rd with my mouth hanging open because I was so shocked at how terrible it was. I read it on the plane and kept looking around because I desperately wanted to tell someone that I was reading the shittiest book I'd ever read.

It was like reading a terrible Narnia/Harry Potter fan fiction crossover. I don't know if you've read the Narnia books, but he stole an astonishing amount from them. I mean, so much that I'm surprised he was allowed to publish. (You'd have to have read The Magicians Nephew as well as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to understand why). Someone please bring this up. It totally infuriated me and no one seems to have read The Magicians Nephew, so don't see blatant similarities.

I hated every single character. None of them had any redeeming qualities to speak of and I had to put the book down a couple times just so I wouldn't start yelling at them. I suppose Alice (That's the girlfriend's name, right? I don't want to have to open the book to check) was the best character and she was still pretty awful.

Tons of stuff went completely unexplained (like why the main character jumps up a year when he is obviously shitty at magic), as if he thought his readers were too stupid to have any questions.

...

So, yeah, that's my mini rant. Thanks for bringing this up.

Grace wrote: "It totally infuriated me and no one seems to have read The Magicians Nephew, so don't see blatant similarities."

I saw that, too. But I am pretty sure all of the similarities were meant to be an homage, not a ripoff. He was attempting to make it an adult-ified tribute to the books we grew up loving as kids, and was fully aware that he had those echoes in it.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think he was very successful, but I didn't find myself hating it quite as much as everyone else. I did feel it could do with a LOT of trimming, and the characters were flat an unlikeable, but I thought he had an interesting premise to play around with and had it been better written I would have loved the book.

I also thought it had echoes this book/series: which is a classic Christian fantasy that also pays tribute to Narnia.

Fortunately for Grace, I have read the Magician's Nephew and it has been one of my favorite books for several years. Unfortunately for Grace, I have NOT read this loathed book called The Magicians, lol. Sorry, wish I could help here :(

Holly,
I honestly couldn't figure out if he was mocking Harry Potter and Narnia or paying tribute to them. Either way, though, it felt like the cross over fan fiction of a very dark teenager. One who can't write, at that.

Honestly, though, I am not a fan of tribute books. For example When You Reach Me won a bunch of awards and was basically a tribute to A Wrinkle in Time. I don't know, it still feels like stealing to me. So, even with some trimming like you suggest, I don't think I could ever like this book.

Mello, lucky you. Don't read it.

That's because The Magicians wasn't supposed to be like Harry Potter. It's just because it's a freaking fantasy book that a guy goes to a Magical College. I think it's so much more deeper than Harry Potter could ever be, but that's just me. The insightful lines Lev Grossman says made me think, I LOVE a book that can make me think.
I think it's a bit unfair to base this book's merits on Harry Potter, a book that Lev wasn't even intending it to be like. It had similarities from many fantasy books. There were The Chronicles of Narnia references too, they weren't plagiarized, but that wasn't the point. He didn't intend to rip off famous fantasy series, he wanted to write a book for people who grew up with fantasy series (personally I did). It wasn't mocking the series, it was playing off the themes some of us grew up with. What it REALLY meant to be a hero.
And he's one of the best writers to come out of this decade, I am sorry, I just cannot see how his writing wasn't absolutely brilliant in every way.

Carolyn, if that's what a hero is "REALLY meant to be" and The Magicians is supposedly good adult fantasy, than I think I'll stick to my Children's and YA literature.

The Magicians was awful. I read it a few years ago and the awfulness is so overpowering that I still get annoyed just thinking of the book. So badly written and such a disappointment.