So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane

As a Harry Potter fan, I’ve been going through withdrawal since J.K. Rowling completed her book series.

Many are searching for other books to give them that quick fix. Here’s one I found that I like.

Present day. Large metropolitan area. Picked on kid discovers wizards are real and living among us. They have their own culture existing within our own. Then kid discovers she is a wizard too. She is joined by another budding young wizard and together they fight to save the wizarding world from the most evil wizard there is. Someone so terrible, they don’t even speak his name.

Sound like a Harry Potter rip-off? It did to me. Until I noticed that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is copyright 1997 and this book, So You Want to be a Wizard, is copyright 1983.

And, like Harry Potter, thankfully this is a series. The ninth book will be published in 2008! And you can subscribe to early chapters of the new book.

Learn more at the official site or Wikipedia or the podcast, WizCast.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

“Combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (The Wall Street Journal).

A science fiction, tongue-in-cheek, fantasy, detective novel. Gives a whole new meaning to “getting lost in a good book”. I particularly enjoyed the off-handed way time travel paradoxes were dealt with. Given the literary and historical references, I suspect I would have enjoyed it even more (is that possible?) if I were better read.

With character names like Thursday Next, Jack Schitt, and Paige Turner there’s the danger of degenerating into puns (the Xanth novels come to mind) but it’s handled with nicely balanced restraint.

The great news is that this is the first in a series. More info at Google Book Search.