General round up of nonsense

I want to recommend Lev Grossman's The Magicians as a thumping good read with a great line in sly satire. It's basically about a disaffected young man with a poor relationship with his parents who gets sent to wizard school, which should sound very familiar. He's also an avid reader of some rather poor but entrancing children's books, about some posh English siblings who keep having adventures in a magical land in which they become kings/queens, consort with talking animals and get bossed around by a godlike animal.

Yes, Grossman keeps having large and unsubtle but very good digs at Harry Potter and the Narnia stories. But it's a good book because it's fast-paced, very good on late teen emotion, he knows how to structure a fantasy novel even while he's deconstructing it, and it's packed with sex (not always heterosexual, either: gays and centaur/horse relations get a look in) to annoy parents.

You can't satirise a genre without knowing it very well, and having a considerable degree of empathy with it - Grossman knows his stuff, and knows what the genre lacks. The Magicians isn't so much anti-Potter as post-Potter, and even C S Lewis (though his fictional equivalent, Mr Plover, is a child molester) isn't entirely dismissed.

Meanwhile, with what music shall I torture you today?

It's Billy Coté and Mary Lorson's Piano Creeps. One of those indefinable albums, really. These two used to be Madder Rose, one of my favourite bands, though never a group you hear people rave about - introspective, melancholy, thoughtful American indiepop from the 90s, carried on in Lorson's albums as Saint Low (she was booked to play in The Dark Place a few years ago but it never came off - one of life's disappointments). I'll talk about these records when I get to them, in about three years!

Piano Creeps (love the ambiguous title) is odd because you just don't hear many (mostly) instrumental indie albums other than Mogwai's mumbleSHOUT stuff. It's all about piano-led textures - you could put this on as background music, but you'd soon find the oddness demanding your attention.

It definitely pays to obsessively collect stuff by splinter groups and band spinoffs!

Here's 'Piano Creeps'

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