Fiction for Sorcerers
Over on the Strategic Sorcery Group we were having a discussion about fiction for Sorcerer’s sparked by this post over at Blue Flame Magick.
Here was my list of 12.
1. The Club Dumas – such a great view of fallen angels, promethian spirituality and interpretation of images. A fun romp.
2. Generation X by Douglas Coupland – Unfortunately suffers from having a title that spawned an 
over-used buzzword. That said, this was the first book I ever read about ordinary people rejecting the path laid out by society and choosing a life-less-ordinary. They made their lives a story and lived simply. There are a lot of lessons here that still hold up.
3. Under the Glacier by Halldor Laxness – The book every pagan should read. Treats the mysteries as being transcendent while still immanent and physical. Just awesome.
4. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov – Novel about magic and love and avoiding
both Heaven and Hell. Plus, don’t you want to read the book that was the inspiration for Sympathy for the Devil? 
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – The movie was a love story, and so is the book, but the book has whole chapters of philosophical musing related to the story. Mostly about the idea of eternal recurrence, and eventually throwing out that concept and showing that everything in life happens only once and never again – this is the “Unbrearable Lightness”. Every moment is unique.
6. Black Easter by James Blish – Very cool and surprisingly accurate use of evocations and western magic. Draws from real texts. Thanks to Stephen Skinner and Jake Stratton Kent for pointing this one out.
7. The Enchantress of Florence by Salmon Rushdie – I like it even better than Midnights 
Children. Gorgeously written tale of magic, adventure, and intrigue. Explores the opposition of magic and authoritarianism. 
8. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke. Think what Harry Potter would be like if it was written by Jane Austin and had Harry fighting against Napoleon for Crown and Country. It is SO fun. Explored the relationship between the worlds of Fairy and Mankind, Magicians and the Land, as well as the inverse relationship between reason and magic – something I keep coming back to in consults I do.
9. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The whole Trilogy actually. Very interesting thoughts 
on the creation of planes of existence and dieties within those planes. Plus it kind of mocks both Potter and Narnia in a really dirty foul mouthed way. 
10. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino – This novel will teach you more about Tarot than the last 10 books on Tarot you read.
11. The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington. A moorish 
lesbian necromancer heroine that befriends Paracelsus – do you really need me to sell you on this? Its fantastic and fun and can give a lesson or two about the costs of magic.
12. Thing on the Doorstep and Call of Chthulhu by Lovecraft. I actually think he is a terrible writer, but his stories stuck for a reason. The understanding of hueristics is important in magic, and Lovecrafts protagonists are all people that have had theirs played with or removed – sometimes at the cost of their sanity.
