Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Day 1 (pp1-15): First Impressions

It's a big book, but beautiful with it. Clean typesetting, good binding (incorporating a ribbon bookmark), and I like my edition's blackened page-edges.

I've stopped at the end of chapter one only because there's such a lot to assimilate. It never feels like heavy going, but a lot of information is conveyed in those first fifteen pages, and I want to have a clear picture in my head before I go further. Not all of it comes from the narrative, either--there are illustrations, and also a sprinkling of footnotes to fictional scholarly works. Clarke seems to write with the sort of formal, precise language that I, accurately or not, mentally associate with 19th-century Literature. This matches neatly with her treatment of magic as a dry, dead thing, its time passed, its study only dusty scholarship, never practice.

( there will be spoilers )