Discworld | Musings of the Monster Librarian

I recently discovered The Magicians while surfing Netflix. Yes, I know I’m late to the party. It’s based on a book of the same name by Lev Grossman, and I’m going to say that in this case the show is much better than the book. The Magicians tells the story of Quentin, a nerdy, WASPY, and very unhappy teenager obsessed with a series of fantasy novels about four children who escape the real world through portals to a magical world called Fillory where they go on quests and eventually become kings and queens. Quentin turns out to have magical powers and receives an invitation to attend a school of magic. Brakebills, which he travels to through a portal. Despite being located in upstate New York, it is always summer there. Unfortunately, eventually the students graduate, their idyll ends, and they have to function in the real world. Quentin and his friends find the means to visit Fillory through a portal, but they haven’t been invited or given a quest and they’re just as lost there as they are anywhere else. It’s like forcing your way into Narnia, a child’s world, after already getting jaded and aging out.

Reading The Magicians is kind of like reading Harry Potter if the characters were always drunk, the teachers weren’t involved in students’ lives, and there was no plot or character development except that Quentin isn’t unhappy all the time when he’s at Brakebills. The characters are mostly unlikable and the story is mostly uninteresting. The characters that are most interesting to me in the television series are ciphers in the book. The action and character development that keep me going back to the show were probably the only reason I managed to get to the end of the book– I kept waiting for something to HAPPEN.

But what the book did do was make me think about the stories I know that do have portals and doors to other worlds (and the Neitherlands in The Magicians very much reminded me of the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew). Some of them may make you roll your eyes (I know there are radically differing opinions on the Chronicles of Narnia) but they are an essential part of many stories. You might not even realize how many portals there are.

Rudine Sims-Bishop writes

“Books are sometimes windows, offering visions of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”

If you are a reader, you know what she’s talking about in a figurative sense. Here is a short list of books (that do not include The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter) that have literal windows, portals, and doors.

Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak.

In this strange and beautiful picture book, Ida’s baby sister is kidnapped by the goblins, and Ida climbs out the window backwards (accidentally) to search for her. This book inspired the movie Labyrinth, and you can spot it in the main character’s bedroom if you search for it.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

Portals and doors show up in a lot of Seanan McGuire’s books, but this spare, poetic novella is heartbreaking. What happens to the children who go through a doorway to another world when that world no longer wants them, or they can’t find their way back? It’s not a pretty thing. McGuire has written two other related titles, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Beneath the Sugar Sky, but while I also enjoyed them, Every Heart a Doorway is, in my opinion, the standout.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

There’s nothing officially magical about finding the key and opening the door to the Secret Garden except for the changes it makes in two prickly, miserable, spoiled, lonely children. There is plenty to find fault with in The Secret Garden: there are racist comments about Indians, and negative stereotypes about disability. But there is so much to love, as well, in the ugliness, anger, fear, grief, and finally, after the door is unlocked, the joy we see in Mary and Colin. That’s especially true if you have read the gratingly irritating Little Lord Fauntleroy(I have), in which Burnett spends most of her time describing the titular character’s physical and moral perfection and engaging personality as the cure for his grandfather’s awful behavior and treatment of others.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

Vellitt Boe is a middle-aged professor of mathematics at Ulthar Women’s College in the Dreamlands who is sent to retrieve a gifted student who has run away with a man from the waking world. This novella is a response to a Lovecraft story called The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I have not read (and didn’t need to in order to enjoy it) but is apparently a polar opposite, with a male adventurer from the waking world adventuring through the Dreamlands. This is an inversion of the portal story, in that there is someone from the portal world who travels into ours as an adventurer, rather than the other way around.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

This loose take on the Faust story is not Terry Pratchett’s strongest book by far, but it does have entertaining moments. It also has multiple portals and, yes, a literal door. Rincewind is the Discworld’s worst and unluckiest wizard, who by pure chance hasn’t yet met a fatal end (he is also one of my least favorite characters, but works out perfectly for this story). He is accompanied by the exceedingly loyal and carnivorous Luggage wherever he goes. While passing though the Dungeon Dimensions, somehow he has been summoned by Eric, a thirteen year old demonologist, who insists that Rincewind grant him three very grandiose wishes, which Rincewind fulfills in his typical unlucky and nearly-fatal manner. In the meantime, a struggle for power is going on in the city of the demons between those who like doing things the old-fashioned way and the current king, who is trying to modernize. For Rincewind and Eric, the only way back home is through the door to Hell, but they’ll have to work their way through the mutinous members of a newly-established bureaucracy and a number of people who are unhappy with them for things they said and did on their journey, but relieved to see them go.

Reader’s note: The quote from Rudine Sims Bishop originally appeared in “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” in Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, volume 6, no.3.

I’ve rediscovered the library. Oh, I have loved libraries since I was a kid and have spent a large chunk of my adult life working in them. As a new parent I took my kids to storyhours and flooded them with library books. Now they are at that awkward in between stage where they’ve outgrown storyhours but aren’t old enough for much of the library programming that intrigues them. I spend time in their school library now, and it’s a really great place.

But I have rarely gone for myself since I became a parent. My community’s library has an amazing first floor children’s department, but I have to take an elevator up to the adult stacks. The few times I have been up there it’s been kind of dusty and I’ve had difficulty finding what I want. I have a card for the Indianapolis library system, but the nearest library there is still a 20 minute drive for me. With ereaders at hand, I have not felt that I have a lack of reading materials. It’s very easy to get a book I want when I want it, so why cause inconvenience?

Yet I noticed my list of books I wanted to read, or thought I should read, or wanted to try, was getting longer and longer. I didn’t want to pay full price for books I might only read once that would take up the limited space that I have for my very favorite books. And so I gave up the convenience of my ereader and headed to the library, where I had a stack of holds waiting.

Now, there are two ways you can approach turning in your books or picking up holds. The first is the targeted approach– you are there to do one thing and that’s it. When you have lots to do or little kids waiting this is the way to go. The second is the “since I’m here, I’ll just look around” approach. Clever library pages display intriguing titles on the tops of shelves. Maybe I decide to see if there’s a particular title that I want that I just thought of (chances are slim, but I did find A Grief Observed this way) or to see if any books by an author I like are on the shelf. And just walking down the aisles of books chances are I will discover something that looks interesting enough to take home. Probably several things.

Which is how I ended up going to the library yesterday to collect holds of Station Eleven by Emily St. James Mandel; Get in Trouble by Kelly Link; and Waistcoaats and Weaponry by Gail Carriger, and also ended up with one of Laura Resnick’s Esther Diamond paranormal mysteries (these are FUNNY– in one of them, Esther plays a Jewish departments store elf named Dreidel); an update of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid; two Discworld novels; and a book that I am not familiar with by Mark Haddon (author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time).

This library also does something that I think is rather unusual– it puts new nonfiction up front. Typically, I would expect new fiction to be in front, but the effect this has on me is that I pick up and read nonfiction that I would never seek out on my own. I’m working my way through The Republic of Imagination by Azar Nafisi, and she almost has me convinced to go back and read books I haven’t touched since high school.

What neither my community library or this library does is separate horror out from general fiction. They do try to pull the science-fiction and fantasy books together in one location, and you might find something there that will rock your socks off, depending on your definition of horror (one of Booklist’s editors named John Scalzi’s Lock-In as one of the top ten horror novels of 2014– I love John Scalzi, but I think that’s a stretch). So you may be in this same situation where you can’t find what you want without putting it on hold or having a librarian lead you to a specific title… but don’t limit yourself. You aren’t buying a book– you’re trying out something new. Don’t like it? Put it down. But with a visit to the library where you can take your time, try wandering the stacks, looking through the books, and seeing what out there, that you might not normally read, looks like it’s worth trying. For me, it’s like falling in love all over again.