{"id":8725,"date":"2016-11-08T20:58:40","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T01:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=8725"},"modified":"2016-11-08T20:58:40","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T01:58:40","slug":"jonathan-strange-mr-norrell-by-susanna-clarkebloomsbury-2005-originally-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/jonathan-strange-mr-norrell-by-susanna-clarkebloomsbury-2005-originally-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna ClarkeBloomsbury, 2005 (Originally 2004)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been quiet for the last, um, month, but it’s not that I haven’t been reading. It’s that I’ve been (re)reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell<\/i>, which has been totally excellent, but wow it’s a long book. I first read it in July 2005, and remember being delighted to be immersed in its world. More recently, my boyfriend and I watched and liked the BBC miniseries<\/a> based on the book, which made us decide it was maybe time for a re-read. (He’d read it multiple times already: it’s basically his favorite book. I got him this t-shirt<\/a> for his birthday last year and it was maybe the best present idea I’ve ever had.) So: I spent October and the first week of November delightedly, again, immersed in the world of this book, which is England in the early 1800s, but with magic. What magic is\/means\/does changes for the characters over the course of the book, though: at the start, magicians are basically all theoretical magicians\/historians of magic: there hasn’t been a real practical magician in England in centuries, since John Uskglass, magician-king of the North, left and apparently took magic with him. But actually there is one practical magician, Gilbert Norrell, and then, after a while, there is another, Jonathan Strange. <\/p>\n

There is way too much going on in this book for me to try to summarize it all: magic and a fairy and the Napoleonic wars and a prophecy and Venice and enchantments and oh, I almost forgot to mention, excellent\/hilarious footnotes that sometimes take up multiple pages. Also, I love some of the descriptions in this book so much. Like this:<\/p>\n

After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of the colour blue. (133)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or this: “She wore a gown the colour of storms, shadows and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets. He was surprized to find himself addressed by her since he was quite certain that he had not spoken his thoughts out loud. (191)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been quiet for the last, um, month, but it’s not that I haven’t been reading. It’s that I’ve been (re)reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which has been totally excellent, but wow it’s a long book. I first read it in July 2005, and remember being delighted to be immersed in its world. More […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}