Everyone's favorite wizard outside of a Black Sabbath song
I am not reading the new Harry Potter book, but I know the secrets of the story and am dying to reveal them to some wizard-worshipping devotee. So, if anyone wants to know the shocking plot twists, let me know and I’ll drop you a private email
For the record, even though I feel fantasy novels are uniformly rotten piles of crap, I can understand the appeal of Harry Potter and wish to god that Rowling was writing these books when I was a wee lad. I’d have been on the bandwagon. At this point in my life, well, I have not got the time. People consistently tell me I NEED to read them anyway. If I like them, I tell them they NEED to read Bulgakov; if I don’t like them I say they NEED to leave me alone.
There is something about Harry Potter that kids of all ages love. Maybe after all eight or however many books are written, long after I get done with Musil, Dostoyevsky and grad school—long after I retire from whatever position I find myself in— I will want to sit back and enjoy the saga of a boy who is learning to be a wizard and gets treated like royalty even though he is a novice conjurer. For now, I’ll wait for the movies.
I cannot, by the way, condone the attack on the Harry Potter series launched by many of the literati. I like to read and think my tastes are pretty damn good. I’ll defend anything on my bookshelf. I do not need to lambaste any kid’s book—or any book really—simply to prove to the world that I have read “serious” literature. I do not need to pretend that I know the difference between real literature and junk.
I do know the difference, by the way. Glancing through the latest Harry Potter book, I would hesitate to put it with Orson Scott Card or any of that Sci-Fi/Fantasy gibberish. Still, this probably means that the publishing industry will only be interested in skulls, snakes and wizards and stories of magic and fanciful British characters. There goes my chance of ever getting published.
For the record, even though I feel fantasy novels are uniformly rotten piles of crap, I can understand the appeal of Harry Potter and wish to god that Rowling was writing these books when I was a wee lad. I’d have been on the bandwagon. At this point in my life, well, I have not got the time. People consistently tell me I NEED to read them anyway. If I like them, I tell them they NEED to read Bulgakov; if I don’t like them I say they NEED to leave me alone.
There is something about Harry Potter that kids of all ages love. Maybe after all eight or however many books are written, long after I get done with Musil, Dostoyevsky and grad school—long after I retire from whatever position I find myself in— I will want to sit back and enjoy the saga of a boy who is learning to be a wizard and gets treated like royalty even though he is a novice conjurer. For now, I’ll wait for the movies.
I cannot, by the way, condone the attack on the Harry Potter series launched by many of the literati. I like to read and think my tastes are pretty damn good. I’ll defend anything on my bookshelf. I do not need to lambaste any kid’s book—or any book really—simply to prove to the world that I have read “serious” literature. I do not need to pretend that I know the difference between real literature and junk.
I do know the difference, by the way. Glancing through the latest Harry Potter book, I would hesitate to put it with Orson Scott Card or any of that Sci-Fi/Fantasy gibberish. Still, this probably means that the publishing industry will only be interested in skulls, snakes and wizards and stories of magic and fanciful British characters. There goes my chance of ever getting published.
posted by ZombieDante at 1:43 PM
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