Jen Miller

Anyone who has gone to a good theater production knows that the stage contains a magic of its own.  I'm not necessarily talking about just Broadway shows or those on London's West End, although these often do contain magic.  No, I'm talking about any production that takes on a life of its own, where the script is just the beginning, and where the members of the audience become active players in the drama.  It can happen anywhere, from New York to New Prague, from Tony-winning shows to those performed by grade school children.  There is something about the stage, the lights, the curtain, the costumes and makeup, and most importantly, the idea of make-believe that has the potential to imbue any theatrical production with magic.

Which is why Barbara Ashford's novel Spellcast makes so much sense.  Spellcast tells the story of Maggie Graham, a thirty-something who loses her job at the beginning of the novel and decides to head to Vermont to figure out what to do with her life.  As she's driving she is inexplicably drawn to a small town called Dale, and once she's there, she finds herself auditioning for a summer theater company.  She gets parts in all three of that summer's productions--Brigadoon, a new play entitled The Sea-Wife, and Carousel--and soon finds herself immersed in a world that seems a bit too good to be real.

Although I was fairly hard on Falling Skies in my initial look at the series, I have been enjoying watching it this summer.  The story arc about Ben and his post-harness changes has been an interesting one, and the evolution of Pope from a bad guy to a bad guy with (maybe) a heart of gold has been intriguing as well.  The two-episode arc where the children are taken to a safe place that ends up being, well, not at all safe ("Sanctuary," parts 1 and 2) was particularly provocative, as it introduced another shade of gray into the "humans good, aliens bad" dichotomy.  I have also been pleasantly surprised that a number of episodes have passed the Bechdel test--my favorite one being "Sanctuary (part 1)" in which Maggie teaches Anne how to shoot a gun.  And perhaps most importantly, the characters have made strategy choices in their fight against the aliens that make me think that they are perhaps not completely without common sense after all.

So, coming into the two-hour season finale, I had a number of expectations [spoilers after the jump]:

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to last week's celebration of Lev Grossman's The Magician King!  We were really excited to be able to feature a novel this way, and we hope that you all have had a chance to pick up a copy of Grossman's novel for yourselves.  And if you haven't already, take a look at what Grossman himself had to say about how he wrote the novel--it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at his writing process, and it also provides a list of fantastic texts that went into the novel that will themselves keep you entertained for weeks.

Happy Friday everyone!  We hope that you have enjoyed our magician-themed week in honor of Lev Grossman's latest book, but even more importantly, we hope that you have had a chance to enjoy The Magician King yourself!  It rocks.

NPR has announced its list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books (as chosen by their readers/listeners).  The top 3? Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Ender's Game.  Check out the rest of the list--it should keep you busy for a while!

Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, if you're in the Chicago area, you can watch a screening of The Fellowship of the Ring with live music, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, next Thursday and Friday night at Ravinia.  Travelzoo has a good deal on tickets--$15 lawn seats on Thursday, $20 pavilion tickets on Thursday and Friday.

Here are some of the other fun things we found around the internet this week:

For anyone who has seen any of The Lord of the Rings movies, the soundtrack to the movies becomes as familiar as the faces of Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn.  As someone who loves these movies and who also plays the piano, I was very excited, then, when I came across arrangments of the music from Lord of the Rings for solo piano, published by Alfred Music.

Separate books for each of the movies are available, but I purchased the volume containing songs from all  three of the movies.  The selection is quite good and very representative of the trilogy as a whole; the volume contains the most recognizable theme music for the various characters (such as "Concerning Hobbits"), as well as many of the vocal pieces originally performed by artists such as Enya, Emiliana Torrini, and Annie Lennox.  What is perhaps most impressive about the collection is the way it maintains the sound of the original orchestral arrangement while still being easily playable by an intermediate-level pianist.

We've been talking a lot this week (and last) about how great Lev Grossman's first novel The Magicians is--it leads to exciting discussions when you teach it, it's clever and subtle in its characterization, and it provocatively blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality.  I imagine that we could say a good deal more as well, passing our favorite bits of the novel back and forth, debating the meaning of the ending, and parsing all the different allusions that Grossman makes to other works.

In short, The Magicians is great because it makes you think and because it's fun.  In fact, I've read some posts around the internet that were disappointed that there was a sequel because they were worried that nothing could be as awesome as The Magicians.

They were wrong.  The Magician King is not just as good as The Magicians--it's better.

Last spring in an honors seminar on modern fantasy literature, I had the opportunity to teach Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  Overall, it was a very positive experience, with many of my students later telling me how they had recommended the novel to others.  We spent three 75-minutes class periods on the novel, and while I certainly felt like we could have continued the discussion even further, this amount of time was enough to cover the main issues at stake in the novel. 

Instead of providing a detailed account of everything that we did during those three days of class, I will focus on one of my main strategies for teaching the novel, as well as one of the major challenges that presented itself during our discussions. [note: the rest of this article will contain potential spoilers]  I then hope that others who have taught this novel will post their own experiences in the comments!