For this week, I read The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan. I actually thought that Night Circus and The Magicians sounded more interesting from their summaries that I read, and maybe I'll read them later on in life. However, I ended up reading The Magicians' Guild since it was the only book that was available online. I didn't like it as much as I hoped to. I didn't feel much of a connection with any of the characters, which is important for me. It also wasn't written in a style that appealed to me. I guess I am not really into super straightforward writing styles. I remember being really excited for The DaVinci Code too, but the writing style reminded me of reading a news article, so it was too boring for me to finish. This is how I felt about The Magicians' Guild. I tend to like books where the writing style is either like real-time storytelling, like with Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Hobbit; or poetic, like Ray Bradbury's writing; or if it's in a way where you really feel like you're in the character's head like in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or just weird, like Chuck Palahniuk's writing. This is kind of bad for me because most books are written in that very straightforward way, and it makes them less interesting for me. As I said before, another important thing is character development, and I can still get into a book if it has that, but I didn't feel like The Magician's Guild had really very interesting character development either. Not that it was a bad book or anything; I can see why some people would really like it. It just wasn't my favorite.
Anyway, in this book, the source of spiritual education is the Guild, a group of administrators for the country of Kyralia. One of the major values of the Guild was adhering to tradition. For example, early on in the book, when the members of the Guild were proposing ideas on what to do about the rogue magician, a female guild member was the one who wanted to accept her into the Guild and educate her, because she wanted another healer in the Guild, and apparently women in the Guild generally become healers, so the guild follows traditional gender roles. Also, when Dannyl touches the hand of a girl in the streets and feels the amount of power she has, he starts thinking about what she would be able to do with the power. He thought that she would probably be used in her family to do tasks for them, and then she would get married off to strengthen the family's name. If she were a boy with the same amount of power, things would be different for her. He thought about this very matter-of-factly. In addition to adhering to old gender roles, the entire conversation had a feeling of old-fashionedness and wanting to do things the way they've always been doing them. It seems like it's a common theme in books about magic for the "good guys" in the story to be going against the way things have always been done. This made me think about how really conservative people are sometimes against books about magic, and maybe this is part of the reason why; conservatives tend to want to stick to old traditions and these books often push against that idea. A big part of the guild's purpose is to get the "dwells" out of the streets of the capital city. The dwells are poor people, and the Guild drives them away each year. The main character, Sonea, wants nothing to do with the Guild because of what they do to the dwells. She is against their old traditions. The society has a very strict and obvious caste system, with the dwells at the bottom and the Guild at the top. It's to a point where the servants for the magicians have to wait for the magicians to say "Speak" before they can say what they came in to say.
As one would expect, there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between this story and Harry Potter. The biggest similarities are that there is a magical society where people train to learn how to use magic, and that the main character has the magical power but doesn't realize that they have it at first. Another similarity is when Sonea realizes that the magicians are trying to find her mentally, but she is able to block them, and the magicians say that they aren't sure if she is blocking them, because most people have to be trained on how to do that, and they don't think she has received any training. This is like when Snape is trying to teach Harry how to block Voldemort from sending Harry mental pictures, except apparently in this world it's not as hard to do that. On the other hand, there are some elements of realism that weren't in Harry Potter, probably because this book was written for older people. For example, when two girls are complaining about men "hassling" them, like catcalling and harassing them. Sonea says the reason she got short hair was to try to stop this from happening as much, but looking more boyish ended up having its own set of negative consequences.
Also, here is a random fact about a Harry Potter-related experience I had:
A lot of people in America seem to have never heard of this, but there is a place in the suburbs of London that is owned by Warner Bros. and it is basically these two huge connected warehouses, plus a backlot, that are where much of the Harry Potter movies were filmed, and now it's basically a museum that is stuffed full of props, sets, and costumes from the movies. I went this summer, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen! If any of you have the chance of going here, you definitely should... It was one of the most expensive parts of my trip, but for all the tears and awe it inspired in me, and for the fact that I was able to spend about seven hours here pretty easily looking at everything, I think it was worth it. So please go do this ASAP!! I sound like Tony Rice.
Hufflepuffs fo life!!
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