The Magicians

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first. His shoulder-length hair was freezing in clumps. He should have stuck around to dry it after gym, especially with his interview today, but for some reason—maybe he was in a self-sabotaging mood—he hadn’t. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Quentin like the world was offering up special little tableaux of misery just for him: crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.

This series is Lev Grossman's homage to both Harry Potter and Narnia: the stories are extremely successful to the point where I managed to read the entire trilogy (1300 pages) over a single week. Right at the moment I am still too overwhelmed with how wonderful these books were to write anything coherent: I need to mull for a few days at least.