If you are looking for a distraction I'd recommend reading Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci novels.

I'm in the midst of rediscovering some old Diana Wynne Jones novels. The ones I've read thus far are in the Chrestomanci line and they start with Charmed Life and The Magicians of Caprona. The thing I think I appreciate most about her books is how refreshingly original they seem to be. With the Chrestomanci books, she built a universe consisting of nine separate dimensions (and this happened all the way back in 1977). There was one copy of each person within each parallel dimension. The only exception to this was if a person was an enchanter. Then there was only one copy of that person that existed in all nine dimensions. However, that one person ended up having nine lives.

They are also told from the perspective of children, so yes...they are children's books. But they aren't afraid to paint children as utter monsters to each other. In the first book, Charmed Life, a girl is so utterly horrid to her little brother that she kills him three times over so that she can use powerful magic. Thinking of seeing those kinds of things today, especially in the way that Americans tend to worship and place children upon a pedestal, makes me cringe at the thought, double that if I were to try and market the book as a children's story and not a horror story.

And there's also the settings. Most traditional magic stories take place in some version of medieval Europe or England, or they take place in a modern world slightly removed. Diana Wynne Jones also borrows this technique, but in the case of the Magicians of Caprona, she places the story squarely in a town in Italy (Caprona) which is at war with its neighbor city states. The magicians of Caprona are two Italian families constantly bickering with one another, and piling slight upon slight for so long that neither of them is correct on what originally set them at each other's throats.

You might guess correctly that a resolution to all of that fighting and a new found respect for one another is in the pages of the tale, which is lovingly told through the perspectives of children growing up in a world where they are taught to hate the other family, and to marry for magic first and love second.

Anyway, if you are looking for a distraction, I would recommend taking a look at these books. They aren't great literature, but they are fun, and there are few books that so easily stand on their own like these ones do. Yes, all authors borrow from one another. But whereas a lot of fantasy fiction is so clearly derivative of Tolkien and/or greats like Tad Williams or George R.R. Martin that they resemble fan fiction...the Chrestomanci novels have enough uniqueness to them that they aren't a fan fiction of any kind. They're just good fiction.