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Book recommendation request: Fantasy book about university similar to The Name of the Wind?
I’m looking for a book recommendation. I loved the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss, but I have accepted he is unlikely to ever write the third book. My favourite part of the story is the university bits. I also enjoyed Harry Potter and the Arcane Ascension series for similar reasons.
Does anyone have any suggestions for something similar? Thanks!
A few possibilities:
I know there are others that I'm missing - I think a lot of Mercedes Lackey's books take place at the Collegium, which is the magical college in her Valdemar setting, but IMO those books have not aged particularly well. If I think of any others I'll edit this comment.
FWIW I'd say the wizard books lean more towards faculty hijinks than "magic school" stories. Equal Rites might be a tighter fit toward that aspect in particular, and/or the Tiffany Aching books in terms of magic tutelage/growing up learning magic.
I do think everyone should read Discworld. It's funny, and punny, and occasionally causes an existential wossname as you see a concept you agree with but would have trouble enunciating in a thesis paper elegantly laid out in 3 lines. "Standard disclaimer" if the earlier books don't grab you the parts people love most are mostly after the first few, when Discworld is more it's own place and less a setting for direct satire of 70s fantasy; and while there's overarching world growth, there's no reason not to jump in at whatever book(s) seems interesting. (Except probably the last one. The last one is a goodbye letter to the readers.)
...
I had to stop reading the series because I felt worse after reading the first one. It's like a mix of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia, but everything is awful and everyone is depressed.
I strongly advise OP or anyone else reading not to read this book/series.
Conversely, The Magicians trilogy is one of the best and most meaningful reading experiences of my life.
I strongly advise (just about) anyone else reading to go right ahead and read this book/series!
As someone who has struggled with depression and who emerged from my teenage years with a lot of emotional baggage, this series felt like being seen. Lev Grossman understands what it's like to be nerdy and ambitious and full of so much marvelous promise--and yet to be miserable despite it all. I can't relate to much of what Quentin does in the book (he takes an extremely nasty, dark turn part way through the book), but I can relate to so much of what he feels.
People often compare this book to Narnia or to Harry Potter, but that's just looking at the story on its surface. At its heart, this book is much closer to "The Catcher in the Rye" and every bit as divisive.
I particularly recommend the audiobook. I have both read the text and listened to the audio, and I think the narrator (Mark Bramhall) nails the narration.
That being said, do I specifically recommend it to a fan of NotW?
Probably not.
In the entire series, Quentin (the main character) is only a student at the magic school for the first 200ish pages of the first book. Tonally, they're completely different. Rothfuss is aiming for an epic, poetic, dramatic adventure (though whether he reaches his target remains up for debate...) whereas Grossman's writing is much more modern and psychological.
Two very different approaches to the "magic school" subgenre.
In what way is it psychological style of writing? I enjoy different writing styles, although tNotW does remain a favourite.
When I say Grossman's writing is psychological, I'm referring more to the tone and focus of the book than writing style.
The central story of The Magicians is an internal one, exploring how the mind of a particular sort of depressed, highly-intelligent, emotionally immature teenage boy often works. I don't want to spoil too much of the story (the joy is in discovering it for yourself!) but in particular we see how a young man who has ostensibly been handed everything can destroy his own life trying to escape from his terrible, internal state of mind.
I don't know if it's possible to relate to Quentin if you have never dealt with depression. Possibly the closest parallel would be addiction (he chases distraction like a junkie).
That second line in my original post ("I strongly advise (just about) anyone else reading to go right ahead and read this book/series!") is tongue-in-cheek: this book will be deeply moving for some people and merely off-putting to others.
Good warning for those who might feel similarly about that kind of writing.
But I absolutely loved it. I still get mental images from it every once in a while after reading it once 10 years ago.
Earlier this year, Grossman put out his first post-Magicians novel for adults! It's a considerably more hopeful book called The Bright Sword, and it deals with the fate of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table after the death of King Arthur.
I didn't love it as much as The Magicians trilogy (I didn't find the character's internal arc as compelling, and the story was a bit plodding in the middle) but I am such a sucker for Grossman's writing style. I am forever shaking my head at some clever phrase he'll put down, or a delightfully obscure reference.
There's something about the elegance and wit of his writing that just tickles my brain.
I suspect a lot of Tildes users would vibe with The Bright Sword, tbh. Grossman chooses to focus on the "lesser known" knights of the Round Table because they're the only ones left after Arthur's death. Among their number are knights who are transgender, neurodivergent, PoC, gay, etc. All of them have been left scarred by the violent and confusing times they live in. But they must overcome their personal demons and figure out how to rebuild a world that is crumbling around them with Arthur gone.
Worth a look if you enjoy his writing!
Thank you! I will certainly check it out.
Wizard of earthsea is something I’ve seen mentioned but I’ve never really looked at, I’ll check it out.
Hmm, magicians sounds not quite my cup to tea, but I always loved Terry Pratchett and should reread his stuff sometime soon, I read it all a decade ago now (time flies!)
Just a heads up, there is currently a humble bundle for the Earthsea series along with other assorted Ursula LeGuin books for 18 bucks.
The Valdemar Collegium Chronicles subseries in particular are also very YA. Still have a lot of love for Valdemar but they definitely do feel their age sometimes.
I'm adding the others I read to my list because then my ranking is there 😅 not trying to steal your thunder
Too late, my thunder has been stolen and I'm devastated. /s
My memory of the Valdemar books is very fuzzy. I did reread the first trilogy, a lot of which also takes place at the Collegium, about a year ago and I made it through the books but it was a slog, the gender/sexual politics in those books get pretty deeply weird at times. My sister has a lot of fondness for them, though, so I wanted to reread some of them. I didn't make it any further than the first three this time around, so later books might be better, maybe?
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I did a publishing order re-read last year. The later books are overall better. It's definitely "of its time" in for example portrayal of a sympathetic gay character but also having that character have a tragic end. By the Owlknight era, the queerness was more casual/accepted and a lot of the weirdness had been dealt with. The Collegium Chronicles just felt very Harry Potter and quidditch except Valdemar.
But I love the Mage Wars/Gryphon books and the ripples into the "present day" post Cataclysm stuff. The recent Founding of Valdemar trilogy is the story I wanted even if I suspect a ghost writer due to the much more modern language/slang used throughout.
I've Read (with emoji for ranking)
❓Vita Nostra: I have no idea what happened in this book, but magical school
👎🏼Ninth House: Yale but magic secret society
👍🏼Legendborn: Regular college but magical secret society
👍🏼👍🏼Scholomance: Magic school, not college, with a 50% survival rate, and 0 teachers. Still better odds than outside
😐Atlas Six: Magic secret society that I truly don't remember if it's in college or just "dark academia" vibes
👍🏼Wizard of Earthsea: wizard school on islands
👍🏼To Shape a Dragons Breath - not college but excellent story about an indigenous dragon "rider" (the dragon is very small) in a colonial European school by an indigenous author.
👍🏼💜Discworld's Unseen University subseries - I love discworld but mostly these don't deal much with the academic day to day, or the students.
👎🏼The Magicians: Magic college. I found this miserable with miserable characters.
Not read:
Tam Lin: A retelling of the ballad in college
Super Powereds: superhero college slice of life (web novel)
Can't disagree with your take on The Magicians. There are things I appreciated about those books, but god DAMN were they depressing and miserable to read.
I do think the show redeems the core concept of the books. "College Harry Potter and Narnia is real."
IDK if it was having more writers, more time, or what but personally I think it was significantly better than the books and only sort of goes in the same direction. From memory basically nothing from the third book made it into the show, to the show's benefit.
Huge plus one to Scholomance; it’s definitely a very different kind of magic story from The Name of the Wind (more “grimdark Harry Potter” than “street level high fantasy”), but I think it’s better in just about every way. Naomi Novik also has a nine-book series called Temeraire that’s basically a straight historical fiction of the Napoleonic Wars, but if dragons existed. There’s technically no magic in them (the dragons are purely biological), but it’s pretty great.
Oh, also, technically the survival rate in the Scholomance is said to be 1 in 4; 50% of students don’t make it to graduation, and another 50% of the remainder don’t survive the graduation hall!
You're right, I had my numbers off. It was like 10% who made it outside the school though, right?
I think El says 1 in 20?? Which like at some point you gotta start wondering how many kids wizards are having (especially indie wizards) just to maintain the replacement rate haha
Yeah 5% of the indie kids. I loved what she did with the enclave/indie system.
So do I! It was a great deconstruction of class warfare and the downstream affects of resource allocation. And also very fun magic! I ran a homebrew TTRPG campaign this year that took place in the Scholomance, and it was so fun.
Oh man I'd love to learn more, that'd be a fun game to run (I'm doing a dystopian Narnia right now)
Maybe I’ll make a post about it! Dystopian Narnia also sounds excellent
I love Temeraire, but I advise people to take breaks between the books when reading the whole series, maybe read something lighter then. It's probably not as grim as some of the other series here people are talking about, but although there are lots of great and victorious moments, there are also constant threads that can wear you down for a bit.
Haha this is so true! I would call it "Scholomance but darker and on acid"
On acid and shrooms and maybe visited by real space aliens.
Scholomance but if you the reader are the POV character from The Yellow Wallpaper
Scholomance if it was built in the tower/tunnel staircase thing from Annihilation (the book)
Now that I know Annihilation didn't make the book club list, I'm definitely moving it up in my TBR.
Tam Lin is predominantly about the experience of life as a humanities and theater focused undergraduate student at a us liberal arts college.
The fantasy in this book appears abruptly at the end.
The approach to campus life is sanitized and idealized.
It is a good book to learn nerdy tidbits of knowledge about classic Latin and Greek plays if you don't want to study languages or read the originals in translation.
Thanks, I hadn't read but it was on my list and I didn't know much!
Great I’ll give them a go!
Adding in that I really enjoyed the scholomance, it was quite the page turner! I don't know that I enjoyed the later books as much, still good, but once the discovery is finished, it's hard to top, so I don't blame the author there. However the first biok is a+ and would highly reccomend for fans of magic schools!
Super Powereds is fun but only in a turn-your-brain-off-completely sort of way
I read it when recovering from surgery and it was perfect
I've put a KU subscription on my Christmas list just to have some junk food to read between other books so I may try it out
It's likely that you can get 3 months of KU for 99 cents/month as part of black friday, even if you previously had a subscription
Yeah I'm not sure how it works with a gift sub. Maybe I have to do the 3 months?
I think if you buy 3 months for yourself at 99 cents/month you can then get gifted and the gift will happen after
I'll second the Mage Errant series.
But also I'd suggest checking out Mother of Learning. It heavily inspired Arcane Ascension, as well as being a huge influence for the fairly new /r/progressionfantasy genre.
Mother of Learning.
There is a reason that, even though it was finished over a year ago, it is still at the number one spot on Royalroad's Best Rated list. It really is just that good.
Excellent quality, excellent progression without losing the feeling of 'earning' that progress. Cannot recommend this story enough.
Ah, I knew I was missing something. Mother of Learning is pretty cool, I agree.
Yeah, I think I will give that a go. thanks!
At the risk of very loosely interpreting your criteria, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an excellent story about one magician teaching another. I wholeheartedly adore the book. It's a slow burn, with a thoroughly academic vibe throughout, and is superbly witty.
It's not really got a university type setting. The tuition happens mostly in a one-on-one context, and is often relegated to the background in lieu of exploring the relationship between these two gentlemen. And stylistically it's very removed from Rothfuss' writing. But it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of fantasy (possibly even fiction?) of this century.
(See also, a tremendously good BBC adaptation of the same)
I love Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, but I've found it to be a surprisingly divisive book. My mom and sister are both voracious readers and have read a lot of SFF, and both bounced off of this book so hard. On the other hand, I've read a lot of the same stuff as them but I agree with you, I think it's one of the best fantasy books ever written.
I've bounced multiple times too. Idk why
It's very dry, and it's a pastiche of 19th century novels in tone and style. With the addition of footnotes and an academic voice, it can come across as a challenging read (tonally, not in terms of your reading level). I struggled the first time as well, but on a second try I really enjoyed it. Have you tried the audiobook?
I've not as it's more of an investment (and i was in college when it came out so not my best reading time.) but it's not a bad idea
But I keep bouncing off Piranesi too, rather literally, I've not made it more than a few pages. So I can't tell what it is.
If we are going to add apprenticeship stories, here are a few of my favorites.
The sword in the stone section of the once and future king by t h White.
The dragon and the George and sequels by Gordon Dickson,
Another fine Myth and sequels by Robert Aspirin (light comedy),
The adventures of dunk and Egg (knight and squire, not wizard),
Oh Man, I had forgotten about the Robert Asprin books. How do they hold up? I read them ages ago around the same age I was reading Piers Anthony, and I think most of us know how those books aged...
I should revisit them. I remember that Tananda was quite sexy, and that Maasha being fat and unattractive was part of her story line. However, Tawanda was a bad ass tough girl fighter.
As a girl teenager at the time, I had no complaints and I didn't care for piers Anthony.
So, I don't quite know how to answer.
Wow that’s very high praise. Not really what I’m looking for right now but will consider it in future if you think it’s that good. Thanks!
The Will of the Many by James Islington
Somewhat of a "Gary Stu" type of character but the story and ending are pretty good. His previous trilogy was well plotted and intricate, so I have high hopes for the series in general.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (goodreads link), It's not "magical school" book but the protagonist is a graduate student, there are many magical elements and themes of self- discovery, fate, responsibility and the consequences of one's choices. I started reading it not knowing what to expect and left it a little heartbroken that it was over.
I just finished Mark Lawrence’s twelve-book super series (The Book of the Ancestor, The Broken Empire, The Red Queen’s War, and The Book of Ice), which has some fantastic world building and character arcs.
The first of these, The Book of the Ancestor, takes place in a convent, dedicated to teaching the novices magic. It’s moderately dark, but very engaging. And the magic system that gets played out over those four series (there’s no officially recommended reading order, but I recommend the order I shared) is fantastic.
That sound good! If there is no reading order does that mean the books are not temporally linked?
I think you'll enjoy it! Each of those titles is a three-book series; the three books in a given series should be read in order.
I recommend reading them in the above order because that's the order from least to most exposition about the universe, so you get the joy of learning the lore alongside the characters.
Others have already mentioned it in the thread, but I cannot help but lead with it. Mother of Learning by nobody103. Progression magical fantasy in a somewhat-magitech world, with a significant portion of the story set in a school environment. Truly excellent progression fantasy that doesn't lose the 'the character really earned their progress' feeling.
Mark of the Fool - Alex Roth is unfortunate enough to be chosen by fate to bear a hero's mark - the worst one, the mark of the Fool. The mark makes it massively easier to do.... camp follower shit, making the lives of the other, actually important heroes easier until he eventually dies, as most Fools have died early in past cycles. Alex decides it's a much better idea to run away from his home nation and go to a wizard academy in a far-away nation. Unfortunately, he learns that the mark also likes to massively interfere with anything related to magic, and also anything related to combat. Sucks to be you, Alex - unless he can figure out how to exploit and cheat his way around the mark.
Interesting, I’ll take a look Thanks!
Two that are more of a reach:
Significant parts of The Wheel of Time take place in the White Tower which is basically a school for magic, and there are some other things that come later that I will just allude to to avoid spoilers. The whole series has a "learning how the One Power works" vibe that feels similar to Kvoth's progression, though it has been a minute since I read any of Rothfuss' stuff. Obviously the scope of the whole story is much bigger than just the school parts and it is 14 books + a prequel. You won't hit the White Tower stuff in earnest until book 2.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson is more of a monastery for scientists than a school for magicians, but it works out similar and definitely has the academic vibe.
WoT also dumps the "magic school" vibes fairly quickly (well...quickly for WoT) so if that's the primary thing OP is looking for I'm not sure WoT is really going to scratch the itch. I do think it's a series that any fan of Fantasy should at least make an attempt to finish, though.
The wheel of time has been on my radar, but it’s such a big series I’m not sure I have the time (ha) for it atm! But I do plan on eventually checking it out. Thanks!
When you do, the audiobook version is excellent. The Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, who are husband and wife IRL, do the whole series. They are the same narrators who do Brandon Sanderson's Storm light series (perhaps unsurprising since he finished the last three books from RJ's notes).
It's probably 150 hours of narration, but a good way to consume it.
Normally, I do not recommend fan fiction as it's typically pretty awful. However, if you are curious to read about Harry Potter from a child genius trope perspective, I'd recommend https://hpmor.com/
It's a rare case of well written fan fiction with a premise I found pretty interesting. Moreover, it's complete, free and I believe was endorsed by Rowling.
I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but HPMoR is the most infuriatingly smug thing I've read since The Fountainhead. It's reasonably well written for a fanfic but I've rarely read anything that made me actively dislike the narrator more. 😅
Not rude at all. That's pretty accurate haha.
It absolutely is smug. I still felt it was written well regardless of it's fan fiction status. But you're right; you will know fairly early on if you'll be able to tolerate the level of smugness from the narrator.
Perhaps The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan? More of a master and apprentice type I think, but it has been a while since I read it.
I’ve read that, I did enjoy it!
I can heartily recommend A Practical Guide to Sorcery by Azalea Ellis. Free to read online, although it's not quite done yet. It's not just about the school bits but the school is a major character in the narrative and should scratch that itch for you. A very well done book generally with fascinating worldbuilding.
Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series might work for you. It's not amazing, but it's easy reading and reasonably fun.
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros - All university all the time. It's unapologetically a pulpy romance fantasy with dragons and magic, aimed at women. My wife picked it up, so I read it at the same time for giggles and had a blast. Not high art but it's a page turner.
I also read and enjoyed it. I can pick it apart but it was entertaining.
The "spice level" is significantly higher than Name of the Wind. But it's less poetic during the sex scenes.