On the Book The Magician
Moving stuff from Facebook for archival purposes.
My bad experience with Piocoult’s “Wish You Were Here” reminds me of the worst published book I’ve read to completion of all time.*
This particular toilet-shaped trophy and the only one star in my Goodreads profile go to “The Magicians” by Lev Grossman. Inexplicably, and perhaps most irritatingly, yes, the same series turned TV series by SyFy and has reached five seasons.** This is the only book I have read that deservingly can be called shit - the writing is shit, the plot is shit, the characters are shit, its very existence is shit.
What makes this book shittier compared to other shit books I’ve read is that I’ve read this book to completion and have been left horribly scarred, hoping that there is light at the end of the tunnel but torn instead by Cenobites due to my hubris. There are other shit books I’ve read to completion, like “The Alchemist” and “Veronica Decides to Die,” both by Paulo Coehlo but at least with him, I kinda get what he’s going for. Coehlo is shit and pretentious, but you know, maybe he’s just not for me, and I get why some readers like him.
Maybe my hatred of “The Magicians” comes from the fact that it’s obvious fan fiction combining the plot of “Harry Potter” and “Narnia” with a bit of adult seasoning on it. “Get it? It’s adult! This is not for babies.” This is not to say fanfics are bad, but there is something about this book that is so haughty about its presentation. The main character (and hell, maybe all of them) reads and sounds like Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix, which is arguably the worst version of Potter, except here made worse because the author attempts to say at every turn, “Look, he’s so cool!”
There is this scene in the book where the MC and FMC turned into foxes (or were they rabbits) and had sex. Jesus H. Christ, that was a painful scene just to show how adult this book is, made more painful by the fact that - again, this bears repeating - the writing is shit, the plot is shit, the characters are shit, and from the top of the mountains to the deepest of the seas, its very existence is shit.
This is the ONLY book I hate with a passion. I always think of books - any book - as having merit (and I’ve read through passages of the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey series), but this book forced me to face the cold reality that, indeed, there are certain books out there that really does deserve to be burned.
*The worst book - published or not - goes to my own college thesis, which is doubly the shit as “The Magicians,” but at least I didn’t let around fifty thousand (counting the 1- and 2-star ratings in Goodreads) of readers go through hell: Just my advisor.
** I’ve heard the TV series is better than the books.