Fantasy's Relevance to Today's World

In our fast-paced, congested and time-strict society that we live in, it's hard for many people to "find time" to read fantasy novels, or even find reasoning as to why they should. Of course one could take into consideration the idea that fantasy novels and the genre itself, can be a nice break from reality and our hectic lifestyles, and also it can be a nice break from our boring/stuffy critical texts that we so commonly drag ourselves through. Movies alone can create a nice break from these types of issues, but I feel as though you don't get the same impact from a movie as you do from reading a book. Yes, watching movies is easier, but while reading, you can create the world in your own perspective, through the eyes of the author. That is to say that the author creates a certain world or key aspect in their novel of how they interpret the world or character to look or act, but as a reader you are able to twist these conceptions into your own thoughts and imagine them as your own, with the guidelines set up by the author. Another interesting thing is that you can learn lessons from novels in the fantasy genre. No I don't mean lessons as in not to go fight off a mystical dragon in a far away land, but for instance in Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians, we learn that magic isn't always what we expect it to be. As in, Quentin Coldwater and his group of friends enter into this school of magic and learn all of it's ways and how to do all of these amazingly powerful things, yet when they graduate with a degree in magic, they have no idea what to do with themselves in the real world. So where magic may seem really cool and awesome at the time, it goes to show you that it doesn't necessarily have an relevance in the real world when looking for a job. Anyways that's my blurb for today.

Harry Potter on Facebook

Considering majority of the nation has been taken over by networking sites, I thought it would be interesting to create facebook pages for a couple of main characters from JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, and from Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians. Considering I am taking a Fantasy Fiction course at SUNY Fredonia, I thought it would be a good way to promote awareness about these characters by creating social networking pages for them, so students from the college can friend them and post about them via facebook. Anyways here is a link to Harry Potter's blog so far..

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/profile.php?id=100001850668382

also here is Quentin's facebook so far:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=100001594856092