The Magicians

Photo: Here and here.

"As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and and one-time variations as there were rules."

The Magicians, p. 149
By Lev Grossman
Published 2009