#i usually hate footnotes in books but the bartimaeus footnotes!!!!!

[wordsgood]

lockwood co this, lockwood co that. where are my real ones (kids who were traumatized emotionally by the bartimaeus trilogy)

[neriad13]

You’ve read the Bartimaeus Sequence? I’d love to hear your thoughts!! I haven’t met many other people who’ve read it but it lowkey shaped me as a person when I read it as a kid.

Heck yessssss! I read it... something like 15 years ago now (0.o) and have forgotten a lot, but what I *do* remember is how much I've always loved Johnathan Stroud's worldbuilding. He's a writer who always sets up an incredibly clear, well-defined set of rules for how the world works... and then goes "okay...now how far can I stretch them without *quite* breaking them?" and usually ends up doing so in a way which reveals a deeper truth about the world or changes how one looks at the entire story, which is something I tend to gravitate to in my own writing to this day.

Bart's footnotes are THE BEST. There was a point at which I had to stop myself from jumping straight to the footnote when I turned a page before reading what it was actually a footnote of because they were so consistently witty and entertaining.

Freaking loved Bartimaeus' character in general. There's so many layers to him. On one level, he kind of *is* the lonely kid he pretends to be. But on the other, he is definitely an impossibly old, impossibly dangerous entity. Who is also a softy. Who will also take every small, nigh pointless opportunity offered to snark at the people who have enslaved him, to cope. Which is way too relatable these days, honestly.

I used to hate the idea of a Bartimaeus movie because I could not possibly imagine the film industry of my childhood doing justice to DemonWorld. It'd be a bad cgi oil slick, with none of the wonder of what this place actually *is*. These days, I'm feeling a little less ambivalent about it...but still not holding my breath that it'll be good. Of my favorite childhood books that have gotten movie adaptations, there's not a whole lot of them that I've liked.

This might be more of a Lockwood and Company thing - which I've read more recently - but another thing I like about Stroud in general is that while he's ostensibly a ya adventure writer, he also doesn't gloss over how messed up it is that the responsibility for saving the world has been thrust into the hands of children. And doesn't shy away from being really, truly scary!

Speaking of books that I've never met anyone else who has read, please, is there anyone else out there who's read The Edge Chronicles?? Out of everything I read as a kid, I swear that was the one that shaped me the most.