Ninth House

"This is the most contemporary novel on the list. It’s set at Yale. Yale famously has about a dozen secret societies, which have these interesting stone headquarters dotted around New Haven. If you’ve ever gone there, you’ll be aware of them as a mysterious presence… Probably all that actually goes on in them is a lot of drinking and hooking up. But in the fantasy world of Ninth House , they are hotbeds of actual sorcery, and each house has a particular magical specialty that it practices, and the magic is always crossing dangerous lines and getting them into trouble. So there is a ninth house which is tasked with keeping all the others in line, and making sure things don’t go off the rails. That is where our heroine comes in. (She’s also from California; there’s probably a lot of The Secret History in Ninth House .) She knows nothing about magic when she arrives at Yale, and she has to learn everything, so we learn about it with her. Although she starts from a place of ignorance, she discovers that she has great power within herself, which is very satisfying. We’re unravelling old mysteries around the campus. But the real pleasure of it is the amazingly rich, magical setting and magical system that Bardugo constructs, and the way in which it crosses with the young intellectual American aristocracy. So you have people performing divinations to try and figure out what the stock market is going to do, and making lots of money from it, and buying nice clothes as a result. It’s a really appealing novel, and just an amazing piece of writing. It’s true. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and I’ve been asked if the school in The Magicians is based on Harvard. And of course, it isn’t – it’s what I hoped that Harvard would be. I had hoped that they would be guardians of secret knowledge, which everybody would obsessively pursue – while, you know, looking very good and drinking lots of cocktails. That didn’t turn out to be the reality. But it remains a compelling thing to think about. A young man named Quentin goes from Brooklyn to a secret school for magic. It’s an attempt to look realistically at what it would actually be like, as a teenager, to be introduced to the study of magic – how fun and exciting it would be to be in possession of secret knowledge and powers that no one else has, and to go places and do things that ordinary people can’t do. But it also tries to take seriously how unbelievably stupid teenagers are, and the horrible mistakes that they would definitely make if they could actually do magic. And that is a common thread through all dark academia: being led from the outside into an inner circle, defined by the possession of knowledge which only certain people can truly understand and use. The people who have and use it are, at the same time, doomed by this privilege. But they look so good while they’re going to their dooms."