Is everybody reading their Potter or something?
Anyway, there is some discussion of the latest book in the Saturday Salon thread. This discussion will be spoiler-free, ‘kay?
But because I love youse all and sympathise with the speed-readers who are bursting to vent their satisfaction/disbelief/outrage at the twists and turns, here is my gift: over at the Leaky Cauldron they’ve closed down their discussion forum to quarantine it from spoilers except for one free thread that allows Deathly Hallows spoilers.
Enjoy.
P.S. I mean it about no spoilers here. Banning offence. The comments on this thread can now be about my horrible, horrible censorship of others’ right to be selfish arseholes.
The boy is up to page 119 and have had some relief from computer hogging.
Hold on, Tigtog …news just coming in, off the wire…
Another errorist emergency.
http://laweekly.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/19/osamapotter.jpg
Yes, but I’m finished now. Heh.
And what about others’ horrible, horrible censorship of your right to exercise horrible, horrible censorship? Are we allowed to loudly condemn that too?
I read the leaked copy last week, so I’m poking around the desolated intertubes searching for signs of life.
My partner bought hers yesterday. She got it without queuing in a bookshop in our little Japanese country town - all the copies (japanese and english) were hidden out the back with no pricing affixed.
having read the first 3 I’m over it, so I read the last chapter…
Can’t imagine reading fiction online. For fiction I need to have bits of paper and cardboard in my hands.
But you were always an adventurer, Harriet.
It will be interesting test of society’s collective ethics how long people can manage to not reveal the plot without spoiler warnings.
Personally I find the Potter books the best cure I have yet found for really nasty colds - you simply forget you are sick, and by the time you’ve finished your body has done its job. It only works if you can get time off work, but if so it just removes the agony. Trouble it is only really seems to work on the first reading.
Consequently I have held off reading the Half Blood Prince, stockpiling it like a dose of Relenza. I was livid when a newspaper revealed the ending with not the slightest warning.
I am deeply afraid the same thing will happen with the Ghostly Hallows, but refuse to buckle and try and whip through both books soon enough to protect myself, at least until someone invents a cure for rhinoviruses.
The partner got his hands on Hallows first, and he’s now cooped up in his bedroom for the duration. I thought about buying another one, but I’ve decided to save doing that until I need to get through a long-haul flight (August 1). I’ve started again at the beginning - about 2/3 Philosopher’s Stone. I’m going to try to get through the lot by July 31, although I don’t like my chances (slow reader).
Are you really a slow reader, SL, or do you just do that thing of having about 4 books on the go at once (at least one being a dreadful Work Related tome and at least one is some terrible fluff picked up in sheer avoidance of the first and one or two are what you’d rather be reading?)
I’m dyslexic, so yes, I’m a genuinely slow reader. On the plus side, I only ever have to read something once in order to extract the relevant information from it, which is handy if it’s work related.
I’ve tried the ‘multiple books at once’ caper, but I’m no good at it. If they’re fiction, I get the plots all stuffed up, and if they’re non-fiction, the most interesting one rapidly comes to dominate the others. An exception to this seems to be when I read two or three books at once on a related topic - eg I read The Undercover Economist at the same time as Free to Choose and Freakonomics, and that seemed to work, but it was still a struggle. I don’t multi-task very well.
TigTog, after our chat yesterday I found myself standing at an airport with nothing to do. And then there was a bookshop. With a massive Harry Potter stand. And various people coming up to it and looking interested.
Oh the temptation.
harry potter smotter. i just don’t get it.
Never read one, never will!
JK Rowling is a hero. What a privilege to have given so much solid, coherent, and extended joy to so many people. And to have instilled in so many zillions of kids such a deep (and we hope lasting) love of books! Around the time of the second or third book, I had a friend’s five year old kid run up to me and proudly announce, “I read all of Harry Potter all by myself!” Shit, at five I don’t think I could even crack the Cat in the Hat.
JK Rowling for president of the solar system!
Personally I’m sort of immune to the Harry Potter addiction (was also immune to the much inferior Star Wars bizness), but I can readily see what’s so great about it. Extra heaps of gold stars for basing it all around a sort of specific and undiluted Englishness, instead of American pop-culture flatulence, or multiculturalist poison. Again, I’m not at all what you’d call an Anglophile, but man! What a relief!
“it’s vewy quiet”
Seems to be catching. Often while I work I listen to growling punk rock, but all day today it was Bob Mould’s relatively librarianesque “Workbook”.
With cat-like tread,
Upon our prey we steal…
Sssshh!
I read all the previous ones,from wednesday to friday, in random order because i needed to find them. The book is very good, although ive found a plothole.
This off topic, or maybe it’s on topic, given there’s no topic, but anyway….
I’m trying to get my gravitar registration working. I have uploaded an image, but when I try to select it, I get this error message:
“Application error
Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html”
I suspect that I’m not really meant to be the recipient of this message, but that aside, does anyone have any advice?
Thanks in advance!
P 234 and counting. Taking turns reading it aloud which has meant slower going. Back to it while my partner prepares dinner…
Personally I find the Potter books the best cure yet for latent Anglophilia. If you want to be reminded about the insidious British love of everything historical and upper-class, and their hatred of the suburban ordinariness the rest of us live in, read JK Rowling, and practice those sneer muscles until your upper lip cracks northwards on a hair-trigger.
In what other genre but kids’ fiction would an invitation-only, privately-wealthy school for self-selecting élites with inheritable superhuman powers be anything but an object of contempt? How can the rest of you stomach the Hogwarts ethos without reflexive anti-fascism kicking in? Oh, trusty Dumbledore, yes, father figure, hmmm. Is gerontocratic patriarchy now something to be nodded to with a sly smile? Oh, sorting hat, yeah. That nod to sortitional egalitarianism is supposed to make the Junior Fascist Cadre School of Hogwarts somehow more palatable? Oh, the Slitherins are all caricature Prussians, yes? A nineteenth-century author of potboilers would have had the courage to make them at least threateningly foreign. Make them click their heels, or some shit.
Up the Death Eaters, the only honest characters in the whole revolting saga! The series should end with the last Gryffindor strangled with the guts of the last Hufflepuff!
You’re becoming a caricature of yourself, JPZ. I presume that a Liberalist Realism school of literature as you seem to want to create would expel from the Union of Writers any author who capitalised Diversity.
Pavlov’s Cat, I almost went blind doing so. It was a PDF compiled of (not that great) photographs of each double-page spread. The glare and angle were not conducive to an easy read by any stretch of the imagination! I am doing a slower reread of a real paper version at the moment.
I bought it yesterday. I haven’t started it yet because I’m still in the middle of Grimwood’s ‘End of the World Blues’.
Well Fiasco you could look at them like that, or you could (taken from my position of only having read five) look at it this way:
* A utopian vision of high quality schooling not based on ability to pay (I can’t recall any mention of school fees and while the Weasley’s struggle to pay for books, clothes, owls etc there doesn’t seem to be a question that any of the family might actually not go.
* A vindication of various small l liberal values. The third book is pretty clearly a denunciation of capital punishment (Rowling worked for Amnesty after all), and racist prejudices against werewolves, half giants, “mudbloods” etc are consistently shown to be stupid and self destructive. I notice the advertising for the 5th film says something about “The revolution has begun”. Judging by the images at the time its referring to the students rebelling against the dead hand of authoritarian bureaucracy rather than presenting Voldemort’s return as a revolution.
The books aren’t as politically radical as one might expect given Rowling’s own background but they’re a huge step forward on CS Lewis or Tolkien.
I notice you’re surprisingly well versed for someone who claims to hate them. How far did you get?
Quiet, I’m reading.
“harry potter smotter. i just don’t get it.
Never read one, never will!”
Ah yes, I once felt as you do, and I understand it. I had not intention of reading any either, having a pile of books as high as myself that I need to read already, and after that there’s still plenty of Malamud, Kafka, and Lawrence that I haven’t read yet. But, as I said on the other thread, that third film was very well made, and after seeing that I found myself wanting to know what happened.
Sparrowhawk, I’m compulsively attracted to bad books. I’ve read far more Tom Clancy than JK Rowling, and let me tell you, the similarities strike more powerfully than the differences. Ryl nalyeva, Captain Ramius might have said to his Komsomol-graduate Hogwarts starshinii. Turn into the path of that Mk48 imperialist Death Eating torpedo!
Not from my readings. I get the blowy smell—especially in the two most recent tomes—of a sense of crisis in Parliamentary deliberation and democracy that would be right at home in the France of the 1930s. The good and right, in JKR, are required to band together against a morally absolute enemy. The Order of the Phoenix is guerrilla liberalism, is it?
Fudge could easily serve as a Léon Blum caricature.
True. But the assumption, never, ever questioned, especially by the Gryffindorian Young Siegfried Movement, is that the magic world is inherently superior and more worthy than that of the non-magic. *That* is latent fascism in spades.
Fiasco:
Okay, trying really really hard not to Spoil here. But you so need to read the final book, if that’s what you think. Ditto re ‘morally absolute enemy’.
SC:
But if you’ve never read one, then of course you don’t get it — why would you?
Spoilers! Burn the witch!
[ahem]
Now, seriously, PC.
I look forward to reading the last book, in that case, if it gives me nyah-nyah rights for barracking for Voldemort all these years. Does Rowling plagiarise George Lucas, and have the Dark Lord suck back up to the Jedi and that green little vulgar Marxist-Zennist puppet? Does he get to whisper about The Horror on his river deathbed, as Harry finds himself self-discovering about evil? Or does Draco Corleone come back from Sicilia, corrupted from the good boy he was by the crimes di sua famiglia?
I can just imagine a final everyone’s-happy scene on the moon of Endor with Dumbledore appearing in ghostly light green. Even better, they can edit Christopher Lee out and put a better actor in after the a couple of years pass.
fiasco,
did remember hearing about some kids from some western sydney public high schools who attended some shindig for a debating thang or something at the Kings School - and apparently - yep - they all thought they were in Hogwarts.
On the contrary Pavlov, i actually did start to read HP to my kids but the genre just doesn’t do it for me.
, The books aren’t as politically radical as one might expect given Rowling’s own background but they’re a huge step forward on CS Lewis or Tolkien.
oops, blockquote’s should be around the middle sentence…..
My point exactly, Jo. You can’t tell me that no Ministry of Magic funds go into providing educational ‘choice’ for the parents of magically-gifted children.
I’ll give one thing to JKR, in spite of my snark. If it weren’t for the Harry Potter saga, a generation of impressionable children would never have discovered the very many sexual ambiguities that can come of second- and third-rate authors using copyrighted characters anonymously on the internet. Three cheers for slash!
Furthermore, via unfogged, comes a Guardian article which I’m sad to say agrees with me on the ludicrousness of the Potter world:
I was in Borders last night to buy something other than Harry Potter and was actually shocked — maybe even a little disturbed — to see how many adults there were with the Harry Potter book under their arms.
So I picked up a copy of the book and, just to test what Nicholas Lezard had written in the Guardian, checked a random page to see how many examples of what Lezard called “pedestrian descriptive prose” I could find and sadly he was vindicated. It was, just as he wrote, riddled with descriptions along the lines of “…said Hermione severely”, “…said Harry cheerfully”, “…said Harry quietly” etc.
Do you think people are reading this book because it’s genuinely brilliant writing that appeals to all generations or do you think it’s just because “everyone else is”?
fiasco,
i wonder if high school educators will make use of the harry potter series (now it’s over) and design a few subject areas around analysing these sort of questions……possibly already doing it..
Amir,
I forgive Rowling’s pedestrian prose for the other qualities of her writing, although every now and then I do have to restrain myself from indulging my inner Dorothy Parker. Rowling’s plotting is neat, her characters’ quirks are very very human (with justified magical exceptions) and I thoroughly enjoy the literary allusions and wordgames she plays with naming people and magical objects.
There’s a lot of levels in her books to appeal to many types of people. I don’t think she makes a masterly work in any one level, but it’s rare enough to find books written on different levels like this that one can’t deny it’s an achievement. Technically, I also suspect that the pedestrian prose is also an attempt to make it more readable for younger readers who might stuggle through more pyrotechnic displays of grammatic construction.
Now stop distracting me from the book.
Sorry, SC, I was simply going on what you’d said, which was ‘Never read it’.
As for the Grauniad article (written, I see, by an economics reporter, rather than by someone who actually knows anything about literature), the great big gaping hole in her argument, far bigger and more gaping than any of the holes she so snottily accuses Rowling of leaving (which is so not the point), is that children adore the Potter books and have learned to read in their hundreds of thousands over the last twelve years, or whatever it is, simply in order to be able to read the next one.
I think she should treat herself to a nice hot cup of STFU and get on with reading The Da Vinci Code.
Actually I think this woman deserves a bit of a fisking. Might bookmark it and get back to it.
The prose is like bathing in custard. Sorry. Hooray for Jasper Fforde.
heh, thats my bad for not being clear. I read a chapter, and left it to the kids after that
I’ll pay the books for getting the kids back into reading en masse, which is cool in itself, but I’m just saying i don’t get the adult fascination.
However, this discussion did get me thinking about what i read when i was my daughters age (eleven) and while i read compulsively, the only books i specifically recall are the americentric World Book Encyclopedia (at home) and a copy of Puberty Blues one of my girlfriends nicked from her sister that we took turns reading aloud while smoking Alpine UltraMenthols (followed a year later with Flowers in the Attic - cringe).
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Well I’d say the prose is more like very clumsily bathing in very thin custard, and then tripping as you get out of the tub and hitting your chin on the towel rack, but that still doesn’t diminish Rowling’s marvelous achievement, which is to get kids excitedly reading, and giving a lot of grownups a lot of pleasure too, even if I don’t get it meself. To me, HP will always signify Lovecraft. :-O
Fiasco — aw, c’mon bud, loosen up and puff some stuff. It’s no use reading for political meaning too deeply into a story whose bones are so old and wide-reaching; it’s the same damn story as The Matrix, The Phantom Tollbooth, Star Wars, David and the Phoenix (!!), Wizard of Oz, Dune, and a zillion others, (just gussied up a little differently), the story of human identity and social integration developing. Misfit Kid (Hey, I even bet Harry’s an orphan! Is he?) gets swept off to a mysterious world where the details are weird, but the emotional realities are strangely similar to regular life; and so, in addition to cultivating his Special Power That He Didn’t Know He Had, he also has to learn to be plucky and loyal and resourceful and so on, whilst carrying on with his band of chums who each represent a differential character trait, and strangely, when they’re viewed as a group, they seem awfully similar to a well-integrated adult human personality. Huh. Why in the world would any kid be interested in THAT?
I just feel bad for the (no doubt) hundreds of rejected authors sitting around at home, watching Rowling’s success, and thinking, “Hey, I wrote the exact same damn thing, except MY misfit orphan kid went off to the magical world of Gloobedy-glorp! Why her and not me?!”
Maybe these versions of the Harry Potter series will tickle FdG’s palate a little more fortuitously:
“Harry Potter and the Quiet Desperation”:
In this version, there is no school for magic; instead, Harry’s working-class alcoholic parents can’t afford to send him to the fancy boarding school, so he goes to the local public school and spends the next several years getting the shit beat out of him by the local thugs, which of course means practically everyone he knows. He grows up, drops out of community college, can’t deal with his problems of inner confusion and self-hatred, is married and divorced in two years flat, and finally moves two towns over where he gets a job as an inventory clerk in an electronics distribution warehouse and spends his spare time collecting “The Nightmare Before Christmas” toy collectible figurines.
“Harry Potter and the Vibrant Tapestry”:
The Hogwart school is bought by Oprah Winfrey, who turns it into a Center for Diversity and Conflict Resolution Counseling, headed by Kofi Annan and packed with illegal immigrants. Harry’s new friends Pradesh, Yolanda, Enkidu and Professa Bitch-Slappa can learn Magic As A Second Skill-set if they want, but first they must complete their rigorous training in Activism. In the second book, Harry gets kicked out of the school for not trilling his r’s when he pronounces the word Nicaragua, and the rest of the series focuses on UN-approved social-justice issues in emerging nations.
I like your style, JPZ. How about “Harry Potter and the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”? “Harry Potter and the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll”? “Harry Potter: Billy Elliott II (First Blood)”? My personal favourite would be Harry Potter moving into Ramsay Street, Erinsborough, and having about three seasons’ worth of drama ending with a wedding and a teary end. We’ll miss you, Harry!
Yes, PC, I admit that. It doesn’t make them good literature, it makes them modern equivalents of Billy Bunter stories. Ha! Ha! Ha! As for wordplay and in-joke allusions, the clapped-out cynical writers of the Simpsons whip Rowling for erudition any day of the week. Dave Tiley: KJR doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Fforde.
Qualificationism doesn’t excuse Rowling’s universe of inconsistency. And as the literacy of Rowling’s readers is not a significant part of McCardle’s argument, it’s absence is hardly a hole.
SC, interesting that you bring up Puberty Blues, as it’s reminded me of yet another aspect of the Potterverse of which to despair. They’re supposed to be teenagers, right? Supposed to be hormonal and short-tempered and dramatic? I’ve read better evocations of desire and adolescent maturation on FHM railway ads, and far superior romantic plotting in the week-to-week melodrama of Neighbours.
children adore the Potter books and have learned to read in their hundreds of thousands over the last twelve years, or whatever it is, simply in order to be able to read the next one.
Have they actually learnt to read in order to read them or is it that the children who are good readers anyway have been hooked in to them? From observing my child’s cohort (now aged 8-9), the HP enthusiasts are the kids who are at the top of the class for reading anyway.
Perhaps in the older age brackets, 10-12, there’d be kids who wouldn’t ordinarily read big books who do so because of Potter.
I haven’t read any of them and have produced a child who isn’t a Potter fan - he finds them too scary. Perhaps he’ll be reading them when he’s 11. I find the idea of five year olds reading them off-putting. [Believe me, “my child read all of Harry Potter when s/he was five” is now a recognised form of parental-one-upwomanship.]
You guys are too highbrow. Im thinking “Welcome back, Potter” in which the young wizard struggles to teach wisecracking semi-literate Nuyoricans to, erm. Urg.
[post aborted. self-induced predictability coma]
Any else getting sick of their own online character & schtick? What would such a condition be called?
“Believe me, “my child read all of Harry Potter when s/he was fiveâ€? is now a recognised form of parental-one-upwomanship.”
I believe you, suz. The aspirational middle-class cult of ‘giftedness’ is a bugbear of mine also. It’s not that some really young kids aren’t capable of doing lots of amazing things, including reading through half-a-dozen enormous novels. I think parents and teachers should very quietly recognise this, though, instead of using it to proliferate parental feelings of inadequacy, and ignoring all of the other factors involved in producing precocious literacy etc.
Too late.
Testify, Byron. I’m working over so much old material I should carry a Xerox badge.
Any else getting sick of their own online character & schtick? What would such a condition be called?
Cyberennui?
Você tem a razão, Senhor Basque - when your quips turn out to have been script-developed, funded, flopped and gone straight to You Tube …. its probably time to give it away.
Only sheer laziness keeps me going at this point.
Two things there. First, the bit you quoted was specifically a reply to the economics reporter laying down the law about what children like. Sorry, smartarse little economics reporter, but children like Harry Potter.
And as for ‘it doesn’t make them good literature’ — ha, now who’s being elitist! Any first-year English student would be all over you like a bucket of worms if s/he saw you elevating high culture over popular.
Heh, again with the elitist valorising of erudtition! I guess it depends on the words and the jokes. I’m pretty sure the smartarse little economics reporter didn’t know that the cat called Mrs Norris is named after a dreadful aunt in Jane Austen, or that ‘Voldemort’ means ‘flight from death’, or that Professor McGonagall’s name is a tribute to the flamboyantly bad Scottish ‘poet’ William McGonagall, though I agree that the Simpsons writers probably do. Why does it have to be either/or?
Reichenbach Syndrome.
Good one Suz.
Yes, dont mind me, just a mild case of cyberennui; symptoms may include feeling a little avataversive .
Time to wash the sockpuppets, I think.
It’s been good to navigate around your seas, LP and neighbouring blogs, but I think it’s time to fire up the pseudonym crematorium (hm, good name for a band, that), burn FdG down to cinders and see if a better one rises from the ashes.
If I don’t come back, give the cone a good pipe-cleaning and pack it again.
Hey, not so fast, Fiasco, I was just about to up the ante with “Harry Potter and the Effect of Gamma-Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”!
Shit. I was gonna make espresso.
“Harry Potter and the Shock of the New”
“Harry Potter and the Fatal Shore”
See, youse can get yrselves an all-Oz franchise here…
Storms! Cape Horns!
if it must be so,
Vasco, sleep well in Cochin-o
thats Fado amigo
Adeus!
Good old Megan McArdle:
As Gandalf expounded in Das Silmaril, the History of the (Middle) Earth is the History of Mago-Political struggle. Balrog and Istari, Narnian and Calormene, Archmage and Dragon; generic Chosen One and Generic Dark Lord, in other words, sorcerous gits vs other sorcerous gits, a struggle once hidden in the Astrological Plains, the Gaping Void or the Manifold Cosmic Chaos, now open; which finds its purest expression in the modern rise of the industrial Sorcerogeoise.
In past Ages systems of sorcerous domination relied upon complex hierachical arrangements and magical systems of differing rank, bound by rules of formal allegiance. Necromancer and thrall, thaumaturge and apprentice, druid and acolyte; within all of these sorcerarchies we find, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern (Potterite) sorcerogeoise that sprouted from the oozing, gibbering ruins of past Mageocracies has not done away with such antagonisms, but established new divisions, ranks, and new conditions of opression in place of those milennia old. However, this epoch of the sorcerogeoise possess es (in both senses) a distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society more than ever has been split into two great hostile camps, facing off across a myriad of dimensions — the sorcerogeosie and the muggletariat…
Oh, and farewell (if indeed you aren’t lurking the comments thread to read our lamentations
) FdG, I thought we had our full complement of hyper-literate smartarses with jpz, Fyodor and Nabakov but shows what I know.
Good showing, old chap and find a better pseudonym soon (resist. urge. to. pun…)!
As indicated above I haven’t read the last book, but it was pretty clear from the end of book one that moral absolutism wasn’t likely to be the moral at the end. The students can’t deal with the concept that Snape could be both a complete bastard, and on the side of the angels. Not really surprising when such nuances are beyond the POTUS. I’ll have to wait and see how it turns out, but it certainly always seemed likely to me that they will learn otherwise, and the readership with them.
Let it be said I don’t think Rowling is the best thing ever in young adult fiction. I held off reading them for years because I resented the attention she was getting which I thought should have gone to an earlier School for Wizards in the Earthsea trilogy (from which my pseudonym half derives).
Eventually I caved. I do wish that all those children now lugging round copies of “What to read after Harry Potter” would go straight to Le Guin - vastly better written and far deeper. Nevertheless, I know that Earthsea isn’t going to get children who don’t read to start the way Rowling has, and as Pavlov’s Cat notes there is much more depth and allusions than most people realise.
What is more, it’s interesting that even a writer as profoundly radical as Le Guin originally created a series both patriarchal and monarchist. Years later she added a fourth and fifth book to try to undo that, but to my mind the fourth was of limited success and the fifth was the worst thing she’s published in almost 40 years. Actually that isn’t saying much, but it would be the worst thing of a much lesser author as well.
Its not easy unwinding the regressive elements of these sorts of fantasy scenarios. However, I think that future authors, if they want to, will find it easier being able to build on the steps Rowling, Le Guin and various others, such as White and Pratchett have made in that direction.
JPZ, I do like the idea of an all-Oz franchise but I think they need to be controversial tales in order to maximise the drama. I therefore propose
‘Harry Potter and the First Stone’
‘Harry Potter and the Hand that Signed the Paper’
‘Harry Potter and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History’
‘Harry Potter and the Ern Malley Hoax’ (6 volumes)
Sheri S. Tepper has an interesting jab at unwinding regressive elements of fairy tales in her novel “Beauty”, where the main character plays an important part in the generation of the stories of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella etc along with lashings of Faerie lore, and fails to find such a life glamorous or particularly satisfying were such surface happenings all that was going on.
Hrry Potter and the Cat O’ Nine Bonings ?
On the topic of LeGuin, Tehanu has probably the least feminist message of the lot, as though it focuses strongly on the character of Tenar and the gender politics of Gont, SPOILER WARNING the actual plot ends up putting her out of control and helpless, waiting for good Prince Arren to show up, until her rescue and salvation at the hands of a big fricking dragon. Compared to the strong Daoist message in the first three, and the awesome ending of The Fartherest Shore, this is an epic reversion to traditional fantasy motifs and sounds a strongly Judaeo-Christian note to boot.
Pavlov’s Cat: “Harry Potter and the Ern Malley Hoax (6 volumes)”
Heh heh. Yeah, but I was thinking it needs a little more down-home grit, something like
“Harry Potter and the Birdsville Races Boxing Tent”
IN WHICH our Harry agrees to go three rounds abjuring the use of magic, and Hermione watches with consternation as those precious little round glasses of his get knocked off his nose quick smart.
btw, I was looking over one of those tepid little “What to Read After Harry Potter” lists for new-minted young adult readers, and I was shocked and annoyed to see that it consisted of a long, obscure list of every cruddy magical-wizards knockoff copy of HP under the sun, with no regard for our young readers’ new appetite for the magic of words as such.
Who are these twerps? Where the hell was The Once and Future King, The Man Who Was Thursday, Ficciones, The First Men in the Moon, R.L. Stevenson, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the old Elzie Segar editions of Popeye, The Thousand and One Nights, the Book of Daniel (the real one, not Doctorow), Goblin Market, Cristabel?
Second floor, kids: Luggage, Linens, Mens Accessories, Ladies’ Clothing. Grown-up stuff.
the millions of readers’ hunger for the final installment of the HP narrative can only be an inspiring and thrilling phenomenon. I have little hesitation in saying this even though I haven’t read more than a couple of pages of book one, and only seen the first movie and personally know few people among family, friends and colleagues who have read any of them.
One of the most curious and enviable aspects to me is what the HP experience must feel like for the generation for whom the books were initially written. And I wonder at the extent and nature of the hunger evinced here. The hunger seems to be connected at least in part to the thrill these young readers feel (something I have never personally experienced, as fiction reading has generally been a solitary experience and certainly was so as a child and young woman) in imbibing a series of books conscious that one is doing so at the same time as millions of others and at the same time and in a world that lets so many discuss and listen to each other about what these books mean.
Craving for community anyone?
Tigtog, I agree Beauty was an interesting effort in this direction, but it also shows just how hard it is because, while I think it had some great moments, I don’t ultimately think it “worked”, particularly not compared to some of Tepper’s better books.
J_p_z, that’s terrible. I hadn’t looked to see what was in those “what to read next books” and was really hoping it would be the sort of thing you listed (don’t know all of them, but there are some worthy ones there) not pathetic knock offs.
Leniad, I must say I missed the Judeo-Christian note in Tehanu. Also I’m not sure she’s entirely helpless SPOILER WARNING AGAIN after all she calls the dragon, overcoming a spell to do so. It’s not like she is there waiting helpless for its arrival.
Like poor old Nancy Stouffer. Keep fighting the good fight, Nancy; stay brave and true…
JPZ, OMG.
How can we possibly have been nurtured by so many of the same writers, books and poems (The Once and Future King, Stevenson, Ancient Mariner, 1001 Nights, Goblin Market, Christabel) and still differ so grotesquely in some of our world views??
Scary.
Meanwhile, having just been to see the new HP movie, I propose that kids like these books because they are about friendship, autonomy, courage, freedom, and of course, as Jinmaro rightly says, community.
And death, about which very few adults are prepared to tell children the truth.
Dr. Cat — Yeah, but, is it really all that necessary for differences in world view to be grotesque?
“…or it’s all different…”
– Heiner Muller, Description of a Picture
I’d suspect that a lot of our differences just have more to do with differing life experience; and maybe those books even help to account for any agreement (which is maybe more than either of us would credit). On the other hand, perhaps it’s the books we *don’t* have in common, that account for the split.
Either way, I have a funny story about The Once and Future King. When I was I guess thirteen or so, that book was assigned on a (rather lengthy) summer reading list, to be finished before we began the new semester with a new English teacher who had a sort of forbidding reputation, but who would later become one of my favorite teachers. Being a good nerd, I naturally read the whole thing, not skipping a single page, though of course reading that book is not what anybody would call a chore.
Anyway, the first day of class came, and all of us nerds were ready for some kind of gruelling test about the book. The teacher came in and spent the whole period lecturing about Shakespeare, though, and at the end of the period, he said, “Any questions?”
Every nerd’s hand shot up. “But… but… what about the TH White book?”
“Oh, right,” he grinned, and for a moment he dropped his Paper Chase tonality and spoke in a NY street accent. “It was fucking great, wasn’t it?” He never mentioned the book again.
Come buy, come buy…
I still have my original copy of “The Once and Future King” that was given to me by the one great school teacher in my life (everyone should have one - both the teacher and the book).
And I once met Salman Rushdie and, before he was hustled off to meet really important people, we spend a good quarter of an hour initially bagging Harry Potter and then name-checking great kids books we’d both grew up in the old school Anglo disphora - which included Biggles, Jennings, Just William, Professor Branestorm (with original illustrations by W. Heath Robinson) and even J P Martin’s “Uncle” books - with the Quentin Blake pictures of course.
However Salman had never heard of Andre Norton or Russell Thorndike and I suggest that this childhood lacuna is reflected in the fact that he has never convincingly written his characters out of bosky and boggy, physical and emotional cul de sacs.
Still though, 400 million books sold! Regardless of quality, JK Rowling derserves a good hat tip for quantity alone. And there’s worse things the kids couldf be spending their money on.
But as for you grownups going to potters, I’m sure someone’s gonna come up with a way of blending James Branch Cabell’s philgree and phlots with the current psycho-sexual-status hum to vacuum your plastic.
Also TH White’s “The Master” is one of the strangest and spookiest books ostensibly written for kids yet within an rather adult scenario since “A High Wind In Jamaica.”
Whiskey, death rays, Charles Darwin signing the quest book, Rockall, cashiered RAF squadron leaders and a Jack Russell terrier who accidently saves the world.
I meant to write “guest book” but on reflection my typo is more true to the spirit of the book. And the book.
Chacun à son goût, Nabs, chacun à son goût. I think Biggles is bilge, myself, though of course I’d never be rude enough to say so.
My almost 16 year old daughter is a Potter fan, who stayed up until 4 am Sunday morning to get the book finished. She was already a good reader when she first started on the series (at about 7 or so). My one regret is that she no longer wants to share with her parents in the sense of reading the books aloud together. Up to book 5, she read them first then I read them aloud.
She went to see the latest movie with her friends on Friday evening (two readers, one not). The one who hadn’t read any of the books thought it was a good film, but the other three disagreed, on the basis that it left too many important things out.
If I often wonder whether I have been a good enough parent, the one thing I console myself with is that both of my daughters read and that seems to be an increasingly rare thing, these days, Harry Potter notwithstanding.
By the way, daughter’s favourite ever fantasy series is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I have only recently read and enjoyed immensely.
Backroom Girl, I went to see the new HP yesterday and thought it the best of the HP movies so far — but I think in any conversation about this, the assessment criteria would have to agreed on before you started. I’m always amused and irritated in about equal parts when someone makes a movie of a book and one critic says the movie stuck too closely to the book and the other says the movie wasn’t enough like the book.
But what I actually turned up here to say was, as someone determined to read Philip Pullman ASAP, I saw the trailer for the movie of The Golden Compass before the HP movie yesterday and it looked really great. (Again, of course, only to those who get it that fantasy is about allegory and play.)
In all recognition of the fact that we haven’t defined the criteria for discussing this, I’ve got to disagree on the quality of the latest HP film. I saw it before I had read any of the books, but after I had seen the other films, and I thought it was nothing compared to film number three, and not up to the level of number four either. It was crying out for another half an hour, maybe even an hour. I felt that even before discovering that it was the shortest film, but based on the longest of the books.
Daughter’s sentiments exactly. She also seemed a little disappointed that the new book wasn’t longer.
Another thing - she decided a while ago that, like scepticlawyer she would read all of the previous books again in preparation for No 7. I don’t think she made it past No 1 in the end, but in her opinion, Philosopher’s Stone was quite badly written by comparison with the later tomes.
Anyway, being a well-brought up girl, I have to finish reading my current book before I allow myself to begin Deathly Hallows - reading as fast as I can.
PS I must admit I was quite taken by a description of HP that I heard somewhere - as Enid Blyton meets Lord of the Rings. Maybe that explains why it appeals to children and adults alike.
Jo - I heard that story too, but in relation to St Joseph’s College, Hunter’s Hill. And I think they were schoolgirls of Middle Eastern extraction, which also says something about the broad appeal of HP I guess.
I remember reading somewhere a quote along the lines that “the youth of the Western World have never been as united as on the weekend after the release of Sargent Pepper”. The article talked about the way everyone of a particular agegroup spent their time listening to the record over and over again and dissecting it for meaning.
They naturally concluded that this would never happen again, with popular culture naturally more fractured etc, etc. Yet I wonder how the proportion of the population absorbed in Potter this weekend stacked up - pretty well I’d imagine, and as the last post indicates there has probably been a lot more penetration outside the West.
Despite the different outcomes of Pavlov’s Cat and J_P_Z I think that part of the conflict in the world comes from the lack of a common cultural resource to communicate through. There are stories of peace processes being built on negotiators discovering a shared love of a particular sport or film. Perhaps it is too much to imagine that one day the Israeli and Palestinian leaders will get their negotiations off on a sound footing by debating the finer points of transmogriphication, but one can dream.
Question:
when does the spoiler phobia wear off and allow some good solid discussion of the book??? Surely we don’t have to wait for the whole world to finish…
I was just wondering whether it was time to set up a new post allowing spoilers. I expect most people who were keen to read it quickly have done so by now. What says the hivemind?
…featuring Robbie Coltrane as Groundskeeper Willie!
For the last decade or so, I’ve mainly been getting my knowledge of Potter Inc. from the overheard gossip of real fans, and what I can glean from the movie posters and book covers. (You can actually triangulate quite a lot of info from just those sources.)
But the other day, in honor of all the latest fuss, I finally broke down and watched one of the movies: “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” just to finally get some of the inside poop on all this stuff.
The movie I thought was charming and witty, but a bit perfunctory. But not so perfunctory as to spoil the fun. But amid all the zany, cool details that I liked, I have to say that the quidditch game was not nearly as cool as I expected it to be. (Not very well-thought-out; just a silly mishmash of soccer, polo, lacrosse, and the air-bike chase scene from Return of the Jedi. As Harold Ross woulda said, “Make better.”)
People have been talking about Rowling’s cool wordplay with names. I have to say I was impressed by the name Albus Dumbledore: Albus = Albion/Alba/Alps and their cognates (it’s all the same word), with an additional hint of the historical Albertus Magnus. Very well done. Dumbledore I’m told is a dialect word for bumblebee, but that’s no matter; what the word does here is, it gives a homely mild flavor that cools some of the grandeur of Albus, a very English thing to do; furthermore, the word Dumbledore contains hints of both “humble” and “golden” (viz., “d’or”). Very tasty indeed, and worthy of Mister Joyce himself.
The other names I thought were kind of disappointing. Malfoy? Weaselly? Slithering? That’s pretty entry-level stuff. Oh well, ya cain’t win em all.
The semiotics of the whole thing were I thought simultaneously a bit more involved than I had expected, but also rather hokey and annoying in a sort of politically correct Tom Brown’s School Days kind of way. Colin Meloy’s hilarious song “The Sporting Life” with The Decemberists is funnier and sews the whole thing up much faster. Still, you can see the appeal to kids of all ages: the notion of idealizing your schooling years this way (and after all, every single one of us has had early-life experiences that are analogous to HP’s, in one way or another) is clearly a winner, and for the first time ever I see the appeal of boarding school: after all, your parents are flawed and fallible creatures who are in charge of raising you and giving you a moral education. But at an idealized boarding school like Hogwart (I guess no Muslim wizard kids are attending, on account of that name), those pesky adult-kid relations, and the moral education issues, are all in the hands of actual stone professionals, who don’t make the kind of annoying, human mistakes your parents would make in the messy process. Who was it that said that the greatest human pleasure is the pleasure of being really, truly understood by another person? I think in a way that’s the gift that really good teachers can give a kid at that age. No wonder all these HP-reading kids want to go to a school like that.
Which leaves me thinking: absent all the magic parts, why not try and make more schools like that?
–j_p_z, who’s had quite enough of this and is now returning to Lawrence Durrell to clean his ears out…