Games of chance on the sofa, dominos in drag – what more is there to say for a playlist about gaming? Seriously, though, the haunted melancholy of this particular song lies beyond rational explanation. Only after I immersed myself in books about gaming did my thinking about this song, which I have always loved, crystallize into the notion that it really is about a live-action role-playing game! That claim may be controversial, but I can't think of a song that illustrates better how a place and a certain kind of weather and the whole history of all the books you've read and loved can actually precipitate a moment of transport and take you somewhere else. (Two other songs that have the richness and complexity of a novel despite their brevity: The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil" and Prince, "Sign O' The Times.") This song itself reminds me of a novel: it's brief, barely more than three minutes, but the way the past haunts the present is perfectly captured in both the sound of the song and the meaning of the lyrics. The line I'm obsessed with: "J'espère plus jamais faire souffrir quelqu'un /comme je t'ai fait souffir." The refrain of includes the line "I love you like the last shot at the bottom of the bottle": alcohol (it is the legacy of Dionysus) makes life tolerable and makes life miserable for many of my characters, and another thing the book's interested in is how hard it is to tell love apart from addiction.Īnother song about the ways people in couples can cause one another pain. There must be a million songs about the power of charismatic and destructive women, but this one especially strongly reminds me of my character Anna, the stranger who comes to town and fascinates almost everyone she meets. The Jesus & Mary Chain, "Just Like Honey" Maybe the most famous rock song based on a famous novel (or would that be the Libertines' "Narcissist"?), this song perfectly sets the tone for a book about how the books we read influence our choices and lead to outcomes as dramatic as life and death. Most of all, it's the feeling of being hungry for something magical to happen to counter the boredom and anomie of real life but knowing at the same time in your heart of hearts that anything magical that happens in real life is more likely to involve a curse than a blessing. These songs aren't actually featured in The Magic Circle, but they express some of the feelings and ideas I hope the book conveys. I wanted The Magic Circle to give the reader something of that feeling of claustrophobic desire I experienced watching Fringe – longing to enter the world of Fringe even as I was also repelled by it, knowing perfectly well that the same kinds of thing that make me want to escape my own life and enter Fringe afflict protagonist Olivia Dunham with anxiety and depression similar to my own. I had all sorts of cleaning-up to do in terms of character, storytelling and so forth, but most of all I was concerned with mood. When I was revising the first draft of The Magic Circle (then still titled The Bacchae on Morningside Heights), I was in the grip of a minor obsession with the TV series Fringe. The desire for excitement escalates and they turn to Euripides' The Bacchae, with fatal consequences. The Magic Circle tells the story of three women in their late twenties who start playing live-action role-playing games by drawing on the secret occult history of Morningside Heights. In her own words, here is Jenny Davidson's Book Notes music playlist for her novel, The Magic Circle: If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service. Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. But in Davidson's commendable ambition to provide them with a rambunctious story line worthy of their cultivated minds, the spirited plot is allowed to eclipse its fascinating players." "The strength of "The Magic Circle" lies in the way the novel's three intellectually accomplished female characters simultaneously complement one another's cleverness and expose one another's blind spots. Comparisons to the work of Muriel Spark and Donna Tartt (Megan Abbott called the book "A Secret History" as directed by Whit Stillman") are wholly deserved. Jenny Davidson's The Magic Circle is an intriguing and rewarding novel that follows the friendship and immersion of three smart young women in live action role playing games. Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others. In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
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