At the end of the day, you're also dead.

My favourite book, by a long way, is an admittedly hefty-looking novel called Ptolemy's Gate by Jonathan Stroud, who also happens to be one of my favourite authors. It's the third book in a series I read first when I was in primary school (at about the age of eight), on a recommendation from my teacher. On a whim, a few years later, I saw the first book of the series in Waterstone's and, recognising the cover, picked it up and bought it.

I'll admit that when I started to read the book this second time, I could remember little to nothing of the plot or the characters, but reading it again with a better grasp of the language and a more rounded sense of humour, I fell in love. Bartimaeus is without a doubt my absolute favourite literary character of all time.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy is set in a world where magicians are in control of the United Kingdom. They run the country; their leader is the Prime Minister; they are, in short, a democracy of dictators, if that makes any sense. But they're not magicians in the sense that they have any powers of their own: they have to summon entities under complicated terms, and with considerable threat to their own safety, to do their bidding. That's where Bartimaeus comes in. He's a djinni, not particularly useless but not the most powerful creature ever to set foot on Earth.

Through the first two books (The Amulet of Samarkand and The Golem's Eye), Bartimaeus almost-but-not-quite befriends Nathaniel, a young magician's apprentice, and Kitty, a resolute young commoner who is determined to overthrow the magicians' rule. In Ptolemy's Gate, the relationship between humans and djinn is irrevocably changed.

This book is my favourite of the series, as well as my favourite book in general, for several reasons.

One: it's funny. So funny I have often found myself laughing aloud, and I find that prose has to be particularly witty to make me laugh. Bartimaeus is smart, cunning and overall he's just plain witty. Stroud tells the story through the eyes of many different characters, mainly in third-person, but Bartimaeus' narrative is told in first-person. The best feature of this is the little footnotes, which are without a doubt one of the best literary inventions I've ever seen.


Two: Faquarl. My second favourite character in the series, and Bartimaeus' primary rival. He's not really an antagonist; more of an unfortunately-placed anti-hero. Despite their similarities, Bartimaeus and Faquarl have never quite rubbed one another up the right way, and it's always amusing to read their conversations. A lot of Bartimaeus' best lines come from his conversations with Faquarl.


Three: Ptolemy. The reason Bartimaeus is the way he is, and so much more than that. Even Ptolemy's nickname for Bartimaeus, Rekhyt, is astoundingly warm. I'll say nothing here, because it's difficult to explain Ptolemy's influence without revealing a lot about the storyline, but the relationship between Ptolemy and Bartimaeus is one of the strongest and most heart-wrenching in any of the books I've read, and the strangest thing about it is how utterly human it is.


I don't really remember the first time I read this book, so this next part will be coming from the perspective of my second read. Three interesting things that happened to me when I was reading the book:

1. I found my old reading journal in a drawer in my bedroom from the first time I'd read this book. It was strange to think that I'd been so invested in the characters and physically written things about the plot and people, and yet couldn't remember a thing about reading it when I started to read it that second time.

2. I realised that point-of-view changes in stories aren't necessarily bad things. I'd always cringed away from things like that, the sudden switching of point-of-view in the middle of a story, and regarded it as strictly fanfiction-based. But Jonathan Stroud pulled it off in such a seamless way that I looked at the whole technique with a completely new view.

3. I found my first true literary love, and I don't think I'll ever lose him. Bartimaeus, despite his faults (and there are many of them), remains to be one of the most striking characters I've ever read or seen, and there'll always be a place for him on my shelf.

So that's my favourite book. Ptolemy's Gate, the third book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. There's also a prequel, The Ring of Solomon, which I immensely enjoyed and have read again many times. I can't even explain how much I recommend this series to people who have read and enjoyed the Harry Potter series, the Artemis Fowl series, and His Dark Materials (all of which I've read).

I'll leave you with a quote so quintessentially Bartimaeus-esque that it has to be one of my favourites of all time.