This is not a trick.

There are two people for whom—no matter what public (or my own) opinion might say to the contrary—I will turn on the television and watch every single episode of every show they ever create: Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon. And between the two of them, they pretty much cover the range of what I find interesting in scripted television: all the way from ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing and a flair for metaphor, to ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing, and a flair for allegory…which also incorporate some element of the fantastical.

See, among other things, I read a lot of fantasy novels, and as much as I’m a fan of realism, there’s something about setting a story in a world that is different from our own—where the impossible can, and does, happen—that makes a story lighter for me. I don’t mean “lighter” in terms of the ideas the novels address, or what they hope to accomplish. I don’t mean that these books are necessarily lighter in tone or in impact. Instead, I think that by stepping outside of our own day-to-day lives, these books ask us to shed the assumptions that we have about the way that society, culture, class, gender, race, etc. work in this world. (Or, the well-written, well-thought ones do, anyway.) By separating us from our preconceptions, these stories force us to rely only on the internal information provided. We become completely dependent on the author to introduce us to the rule and governing institutions, norms and unusual behaviors, even the color of the sky of the world we are entering. Cutting us off from our usual frame of reference, fantasy novels give us the freedom to get completely lost in a story.

Or maybe I just like magic.

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t’ tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. - “The Faery Handbag”

Stranger Things Happen is the name of Kelly Link’s first short story collection, but it is also an apt description of her second, Magic for Beginners (which, with the title spelled out in huge type across the front, I will admit I found mildly embarrassing to read on the subway). The stories in Magic for Beginners are brilliant little slices of a life running right alongside of, but never quite touching, our own. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups; just similar enough that I could see myself in the main character’s place, just off enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to. They’re unsettling, and in places laugh out loud funny, and they lingered in my mind long after I put the book down. The best thing about them, though, is the way they twisted my perspective so far around as to illuminate an everyday aspect of life in a completely unexpected way.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. - “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”

I was, for many years, pretty active in one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer online communities. “The Library,” the longest story in Link’s collection, sent me right back to the feeling of those Tuesday nights in the late 90s and early 00s: of anticipation and hope and excitement and the unspoken fear that maybe this one wouldn’t be able to keep all those balls—of comedy, and the horror of both high school and living on a hellmouth, and action, and romance—suspended up in the air. “The Library” encapsulates the feeling of being utterly caught up in a television show, while going the extra step further that is every fan’s secret dream, of being actually caught up in a television show.

The syllable by syllable analysis of dialogue, the cataloguing of details of costume and location and props, the hopeful identification of signs and portents; Link has perfectly nailed the joys and whimsies of fandom with a story of boy and his group of friends, and the television show that they have coalesced around. And then she steps over the edge of the expected, and brings the show to life around him, while also establishing the entire story itself as simply one more episode of the magical show. In conception, it’s a neat—and potentially confusing, or precious—series of nesting boxes. In practice, it reads as the beautiful, elegant dream that every fangirl hides away in her heart, so deeply buried that even she doesn’t know it’s there until the words begin to unspool on the page before her. With Magic for Beginners, Link has shaped stories which unfold with wonder and concise wit, that while constantly surprising me, also felt familiar, as if she had seen into my dreams, and translated them onto paper, making them funnier, more precisely angled, and more interesting in the process.

She has also crafted perhaps the best three sentences about the potential evil of couches ever written. Well, okay. Maybe the only.

Books. Covers. Judging.

I don’t like Chick Lit—neither the genre, nor the name itself—for the same reason that I don’t like “chick flicks.” These are books and movies that, even by the people consuming them, are generally considered not serious. Not serious in tone or topic; they are airy, full of sparkly surfaces and even more sparkly people. Not serious in subject; Killing People and The Government—either separately or in some combination—being two prime examples of “serious” subject matter. Rather, they are focused almost exclusively on love, and the corollary that marriage to the Right Man is the ultimate expression of this love. And because of this lack of seriousness, these books cannot claim the title of Literature or Movie alone, but must take on a modifier, rendering them only suitable for, or interesting to, those without a Y chromosome.

Which is not to say that I never read these books (or watch these movies), but that idea of them makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable, like riding in a hot car for too long as a kid, and so I try to avoid them for the most part.

I am also, however, a believer in lists, which is how I found myself, this last week, carting around Bachelor Boys by Kate Saunders. Whenever I read a review, or get a recommendation for a book that sounds interesting, it gets torn out of the magazine or newspaper, or scribbled onto a little piece of paper. Eventually all this effluvia gets piled onto my coffee table, and when the pile gets big enough, it all gets entered into an Excel spreadsheet to which I have given the rather over-inflated name, “Culture Lists.” Such is the power of titling files: as if by naming it, I can make it so.

But it’s not just a list of books. I also have a sheet for movies, one for albums, and a separate one for individual songs. The list has proven invaluable, since—due to the special combination of the high cost of living in New York City, part-time employment, and the fact that I know it makes my mother very, very happy—my addiction to bookstores has, of late, been diverted into frequent use of the greater New York Public Library system. (It doesn’t hurt that there’s a branch right around the corner from me, either.) And when I’m standing in front of those shelves of books, I get to do the thing that, second to creating and organizing them, is what makes list-making so utterly worthwhile: finding items on that list, so that I can read them, so that I can cross them off. Oh, the simple joys of list-making.

This list has been under construction for about four years now, though, so by the time I’m actually checking out and taking home one of the books, I often have no memory of why it got onto the list in the first place, or even, frequently, what the plot of the book might be. It makes for an eclectic pile on my nightstand. But as soon as I picked up Bachelor Boys, I knew what I was in for. Artfully-crumpled blue-dotted and stripy-red ties mingled (as if carelessly discarded by a handsome young men either a) tired of being contained by the strictures of working life, or b) mid-seduction of a glamorous yet sarcastic career woman who thought she would never find a guy who could make her laugh AND find that spot with his tongue) over looping, curvaceous script; what I held in my hand was most decidedly going to be chick lit.

I almost put the book back on the shelf. But I thought to myself, “Self, you know the old saying about books and covers. Inside, it might be good! It might be a hilarious, brilliantly written satire of male-female relationships that is suffering from the branding efforts of small-minded publishing houses! Plus—and this part is crucial—if you don’t read it, you’ll never be able to cross it off the list!” So I brought it home, and I began to read. And what do you think happened?

I hated it. Well, ok, I didn’t hate it, but it often made me angry. The main character was self-involved, often mean, and frequently quite stupid. Which all would have been fine—I vastly prefer to read about flawed people; it makes me feel better about myself—except that she was these things while being, for large stretches of the book, unlikeable, or at least uninteresting. The “Bachelor Boys” of the title are vastly more charming and interesting characters, but suffer from poorly explained changes in behavior that render them pretty paper dolls, shuffled around to further the plot, without ever being allowed to become full flesh-and-blood humans. And it is apparent, from page one, just what is going to happen at the end of the book. Bachelor Boys was exactly, exactly, as I had feared.

And yet, I kept reading. In fact, there were times that I couldn’t put it down. What, I kept thinking, is wrong with me? I didn’t like it, I didn’t have any question as to what was going to happen, and yet I couldn’t tear myself away. What strange spell had the book cast over me, that it could do this?

The answer, I believe, is that I kept reading for the same reason that, when I’m at home at the two o’clock in the afternoon during the week, I will usually turn on As the World Turns: I want to know what’s going to happen next. Please note: this is a different thing altogether from “how it’s going to end.” When you watch a show (or read a book) like this, you know that it will start at Point A, with two people who do not love each other (for whatever reason: they’re mortal enemies, they’re opposites, they’re “like brother and sister,” or, if you’re reading V.C. Andrews, they are brother and sister), and will end at Point B, with the same two people madly in love. The question is never whether they will end up at Point B, but how much and what type of drama they will have to put up with before they get there. (And in the case of a soap, how long it will be before they ping-pong back to Point A. And then Point B. And then Point A. Ad infinitum.)

There is something reassuring about these kinds of stories precisely because the ending is never in doubt; no matter how bad it gets, you know that it will all work out in the end. So by allowing yourself to be caught up in these stories, you get to imagine that despite all of the shit that you’re going through in your daily life—losing a job, and crashing your computer, and coping with the aging of your parents, and trying to deal with the fact that you are never, ever going to hear from him again—somehow, in the end, it will all be wrapped up in a tidy bow, and you will be happy, and successful, and, most importantly, not alone. It’s a particularly comforting vision now, with the inescapable chorus of Financial!Disaster! sounding in our ears. It will be interesting to see whether, over the next few years, romantic comedies become Hollywood’s new cash cow. I’d like to believe that despite my misgivings about style and subject matter, and my essentially realistic view of my place in the world, Bachelor Boys sucked me in with the hope that I, too, am on a journey: past Point A, with Point B still somewhere up ahead. If I am, it’ll make all the daily crap I’m dealing with in the meantime worthwhile.

Either that, or deep in my cynical, feminist heart of hearts, I am a completely hopeless romantic. That, however, is a post for another day.