Books you should have read already: Libriomancer

I consume what could be described as "copious amounts of media". I go through movies, TV series, and books. Part of this is due to my mastery over the mystical powers of insomnia. Some of it is just due to me loving the feeling of finding amazing stories. I also love seeing someone else discover something that they love, hence my constant recommendations to people. Movies and TV are easy. They tend to be social in that people get together to watch things. Books are a more solitary sport. People don't really have parties where they gather in groups and all sit down to read.

What I'm doing here is codifying recommendations of things I've read in the past year or so and I'll be grouping them in the following way:

• series
• stand alone
• collections
• ambiance

I will start with "series" and I will work my way from weakest to strongest recommendation. Of course, take that in context. That's the weakest "you should have already read this".

Oh, and if any of you are down with the e-readers, let me know. I might be able to help you out.

Libriomancer

(Magic Ex Libris #1)

by Jim C. Hines

I suppose this one counts for part of a series though there's only one book out at the moment. More than anything this book is cute. It's a smart take on magic and literature. The concept is that there's a class of modern sorcerers that can use collective belief and have focused that through books. The more people read and put emotion into stories the easier it is for them to pull out artifacts from the books. They are libriomancers. The actual story isn't astounding. The world itself isn't even as compelling as some other fantasy I've read. But there are parts to this book that shine.

The concept itself is a meta-aware love letter to readers themselves. The idea that the more invested people are in a book the more real it becomes (now literally) should speak to all readers. The author even plays around with that, touching on intent of the writer affecting the prose as well as self publishing.

But there's also another layer to this toying with tropes and creation. I won't regurgitate the character description but the side kick is an interesting take on the hot, sexy, magical urban fantasy female. For that alone I know some of my friends will love this.

And something else that impressed me was that Hines actually has characters that try to find and push the boundaries of their magical system. While one would think that this would be something nearly every strong, magic wielding character would try it's actually quite rare in fantasy. For the most part inhabitants of magical worlds are satisfied to learn the basics and use magic exactly as the instruction manual says to. But Hines realizes that his magicians are creative types. It seems that the standard cover for libriomancers are book store and library workers. How many of those people do you know that don't write? So of course you should have experimentation going on when your self selected magical population is mentally set to play games with power and concepts.

Of course, there's the added bonus that many of the items pulled out of books and used as tools are from real novels. So playing "spot the reference" is a bonus game woven into the text.

I don't want to talk this book up too much. I know this blog series is called "books you should have read already" and with a title like that there's a certain level of expectation established. This book, I feel, is not quite the sum of its parts. I finished the book feeling fair about it. I wasn't blown away and the story was good enough. But it stuck with me and it wasn't until I really thought about what I liked in it that I appreciated  Libriomancer more and more. Feel free to insert your own comment about this criticism being a parallel to the way in which libriomancers reach into books and extract the parts that resonate and give power. I just realized that too.

For more on pushing and exploring magical systems see "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". It's ongoing, long and probably drier than many of you will want to deal with (natural born salesman right here!) but it's incredibly interesting. It also shows how utterly thin some popular fantasy realms really can be.