So who's read...

...Lev Grossman's The Magicians?

Because it sounds pretty awesome:

On first glance, Lev Grossman's new novel, The Magicians, looks very much like a Harry Potter story, only with slightly older characters, and an American setting. The hero, Quentin, is a teenager from Brooklyn on his way to a Princeton admissions interview when he's whisked through a portal to an Academy of Magic called Brakebills.

But Quentin differs from Harry Potter in that he reads fantasy novels, and he's enchanted to discover that the magic he's longed for all his life actually exists.

Later on in the piece, he talks a bit about literary writing vs. strong storytelling, and it sounds like he realized that you don't necessarily have to give one up to have the other.  Which is nice.  That he realized that writing genre fiction doesn't necessarily have to mean writing crappily.

I almost think I have a galley of it around here somewhere.  I'll have to look.

[Moments later:  YES.  I thought so.  It was in my car.  A patron picked it up for me at BookExpo, and somehow it's never made it into the house.  SWEET.]