gah

Wow....I'm only on page 2 of Lev Grossman's The Magicians and yet already I'm so repulsed I don't think I'll be able to go back. Not that the book is or vulgar or gross or anything like that, it's just so completely repugnant to me. Here's one of the first lines: "Everybody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it. Everybody who was going to sleep with anybody else had already done it. Julia--pale, freckled, dreamy Julia, who played oboe and knew even more physics than he did--was never going to sleep with Quentin."

Ugh. Why do I find this so awful? For one thing there's the old gender stereotype about what adolescent boys are thinking at any given time: sorry, but we've already been there and read all that at least five hundred times in the last year alone. Can't you think of anything a little less tired? Pulling out that old cliche in the first paragraph--let alone the first page--is already a very, very bad sign.

And then there are all the preciously integrated quotes and literary references laboriously worked into the seams. That's a tad wearisome, too, plus such tricks rattle my "PRETENTIOUS!!!" button, which really, of all my buttons, is the single one you shouldn't mess with, because I'm so completely unforgiving once I decide someone is a pretentious twit.

Which, sadly, seems to have just happened.

I'm so disappointed. I waited a long time for this book to come out in paperback. I even pre-ordered it on Amazon.

Now that I think on it, it's the pre-order that jinxed it. I should never have done that. It just raises the sense of expectation way too much.

What was I thinking?