I’m re-watching The Magicians with my wife, since she’s never seen it. It’s been long enough since I watched it last that I don’t remember a lot of things that happened, so there’s a lot of “I forgot got that!” moments for me, which is fun.
I’m re-watching The Magicians with my wife, since she’s never seen it. It’s been long enough since I watched it last that I don’t remember a lot of things that happened, so there’s a lot of “I forgot got that!” moments for me, which is fun.
Loved The Magicians! I didn’t even make it through the first book and I can’t remember what on Earth convinced me to watch the show, but I’m so glad I got on board!
The audiobooks are among my all time favorites. I’ve listen to them 4 or 5 times all the way through. Mark Bramhall is the narrator, and he he’s incredible. Many times I think, “jeez… how is he doing that? I know if I were reading that paragraph it would not have been that powerful or interesting”.
I think having been a young boy, and now being a grown adult, helps relate to a lot of the emotional parts of the story. The naive love of youth, and the conflicting feelings of welcome-banality and a desire for life to be more as an adult.
The books get criticism for being “Potter/Narnia for adults”, but I think people who say this maybe haven’t actually read the whole series. That is extremely surface level, and is plainly discussed in the story. The whole point is that this kid grew up obsessed with books like this, and is now just outgrowing the phase of youth where it’s not weird. All of the magic stuff becomes pretty meta after the first half of the first book.
That’s fair, and I do remember it being explicitly discussed and still I wasn’t into it. But I am always curious to try it out again. Art hits differently at different times, after all
I wish I was a reader. I feel like I’d enjoy the books.
I don’t usually give up on books, and it’s been a long time so it’s foggy, but my impression was that it was trying too hard to be harry potter/Narnia but adult! And edgy! And I couldn’t stand Quentin or really any of the characters. I only know one other person that’s experienced both and he also gave up on the book series.
Sometimes I am curious to try the books again now, but the show is so good I’d rather just rewatch it!
Ah, thanks for the heads up on the book. It might ruin the show for me then if I tried reading it.
I replied to the person above to brain dump my love for the audiobooks. I can see where the first half of the first book could be a slog to actually read, but the audiobooks are really quite amazing IMO. Highly recommend trying it out.
Audiobooks have really helped me.
deleted by creator
I couldn’t finish season 1. Too much YA drama and it just didn’t hook me.
For some reason, every episode had me expecting that and then it would turn out to be amazing.
Edit to add: every episode I actually said, “this one will veer too far into teen drama, and I’ll have to drop out” but somehow they’d pull it off. It was really great television