2/23/2020: after a million recommendations from my sister along with an assurance that it gets GREAT in season 2, I gave the show another try. The first few episodes are not good. The show starts to get decent about halfway through season 1, and quite good about 3/4 of the way through season 1, and then does become actually great in season 2, and it's now one of my favorites. I like it so much I went back to read the books again. And whoa the show is so very different --not so much an adaptation as "inspired by", and it gets better as it moves along and deviates more and more from the books. The books are enjoyable though the first feels aimless and all quentin all the time is a lot to take--i don't think I'd rate it 4 stars today--but 2 and 3 are quite good. Re: 3, everything I wrote below, when I first read the book, still holds.

DON'T avoid the show. Push through the first few episodes. It really does get good. It is better than the books. Blasphemy for a book lover, but true nonetheless.

2016: listened to the audiobook. Mark Bramhall is my favorite reader I've come across, and he deserves his Audie and all his other audiobook awards. His voice is gorgeous, thrumming, electric. He could read a list of square roots and I'd be entranced.

Some unstructured thoughts:
1. This is one of my favorite series I've read as an adult.
2. The central theme of book 3 is what it means to be an adult. Piece-of-shit, not-as-special-as-we're-supposed-to-think-he-is, "poor me poor me" Quentin finally does something for someone other than himself, which was a pleasant surprise.
3. There's never enough Janet, but she did get a pretty good "what I did while you were all off galavanting at sea" story.
4. There's definitely not enough Julia, and learning about Asmodeus's fox hunting in a couple sentences at the tail end of the book was disappointing.
5. Alice is back. Her fury at Quentin is, frankly, wondrous and beautiful.
6. I am consistently frustrated that Quentin gets so much more than he deserves. Here, he gets to be a god, he gets to make a new magical land, he gets pardoned by Fillory, he gets to fuck Alice, he gets forgiven by Alice, whose life he ruined not once but twice.
7. Thoroughly average Quentin gets everything handed to him on a plate. But the women suffer SO MUCH just to get at scraps that Quentin rejects. And they often suffer directly because of Quentin. I think I'd need another read through of the series to decide whether it is completely aware of that, and if so whether it's critical of that.

I watched the first episode of the Syfy adaptation, which was profoundly disappointing. Avoid.