Book Reviews: Magic, Parenting, and Fake Facts

There are several reasons I have not been blogging as much lately. There are the standard ones like family, work, and the holidays, but I've also been reading a lot. I don't think there's been a point in my life since I was about 7 that I didn't have at least one book going, but lately I've had 2-3 going at a time, and I've just felt more like reading than blogging. But now I'm gonna blog a bit about what I've been reading, so there you go.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians
There is no way to describe the plot of this book without making it sound derivative of at least two famous fantasy series: Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia. Quentin Coldwater, our anti-hero, is recruited into a school of magic, and eventually ends up learning that the fantasy world he's been reading about since he was a child, Fillory (which is basically Narnia), is real. That's not much of a spoiler, trust me.

The twist here is that instead of young, relatively squeaky-clean British kids visiting these magic settings, we have older, far-from-innocent American kids doing so. The novel can in some ways be read as a long thought experiment. Yes, many of us grow up reading about kids who learn to do magic or travel to magical lands, and of course we always wanted to be those kids, right? Grossman takes a step back and asks, really? Would you? If you had magic powers and could do virtually anything you wanted, wouldn't you get bored after a while? And as far as magical lands go, how much fun do you think being in constant mortal danger actually is?

I can't say any of the characters are particularly appealing--they're all pretty much jerks. But that's kind of the point. Nice people apparently don't make particularly good magicians. Characters that don't promote a lot of sympathy aside, the story moves along quickly. It takes Harry Potter 7 books to get through Hogwarts, but it takes Quintin Coldwater 2/3 of a book to get through Brakebills Academy. If anything, the last 1/3 of the novel moves a little too quickly. Grossman could have easily stretched the time in Fillory out for another 100 pages and I wouldn't have minded a bit.

All in all, a very fun book, and I would recommend it to any reader (over the age of 13 or so) who's ever read a fantasy novel and wanted oh-so-much to escape into that book. The Magicians will definitely force you to rethink that notion.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
Though I have been a parent for nearly 3 years now, I've never been much for parenting books. Many of them seem to work along the lines of "Hey, this worked for me, so it will obviously work for you!", which as most sane parents know is complete shite. You might call it the Jenny McCarthy class of parenting books (speaking of which, hurray for The Lancet for finally retracting the vaccinations-lead-to-autism paper!). This book caught my eye, however, because it's based almost entirely on published literature and interviews with actual scientists. Indeed, the reference section alone accounts for about 10% of the books length. Though the authors share a few personal anecdotes to demonstrate their points, the book is by and large a summary of very real research.

Several topics are discussed: the importance of sleep for kids' development, the actual causes of aggression in young children, sibling rivalries, how to build a child's vocabulary quickly, and perhaps more importantly, how not to. Many parents have learned by now that the Baby Einstein series not only fails to help kids talked sooner, it can actually impede speech development. This book explains why. There's a chapter on lying, and why it's not necessarily a bad thing when kids do it. In perhaps one of the most eye-opening chapters for me, the authors tackle the dogma that thrusting a child into a multi-ethnic environment will help make them "color blind". And in my favorite confirms-my-suspicions chapter, the authors essentially trash the idea that kindergartens for "advanced" kids are worth a damn.

All of this is presented in easy-to-digest prose--it's a quick but informative read. NurtureShock has not become my new parenting bible, but it has changed the way I interpret the behavior of my children, in what I have to believe is a good way. I would even go so far as to recommend this book for non-parents, because chances are you will have to interact with children some day, even if they aren't necessarily your own.

John Hodgman's More Information Than You Require
I can direct you to my earlier review of Hodgman's first book, and that would pretty much cover my bases here. This book is basically a continuation of The Areas of My Expertise--the page numbers even start where the last book's left off. Only this time we have a list of mole man names instead of hobo names, and Hodgman himself was a bit more famous when he wrote this book. Is it essential reading? Absolutely not. Is it still pretty damn funny? Yes. That is all.