I finally succumbed and read a Harry Potter book this weekend. Decent, but not fabulous; definitely overhyped. Just MHO of course.
For your consideration, DAVEW0071 – Another author of excellent children’s – well, “young adult”/teen-targeted books is Rosemary Sutcliff. She wrote a number of historical novels set in Britain, from Pict times to the Norman era. Really well-written and enjoyable. She also wrote Sword at sunset,an adult-aimed novel about King Arthur as he might really have lived. Some of her books are still in print, and they’re well worth searching for.
I haven’t gotten to the latest Harry Potter yet; it’s still a few books down in my to-be-read pile; but I’m looking forward to it.
lucwarm, did you read just the first one? If so, it’s not the best of the series, and it’s the one most written as a children’s book. I’ve found books 3-5 to be absolute page-turners.
Moderator’s Notes:
I’m moving this ancient thread over to Cafe Society - with all the other Harry Potter threads.
evilbeth, I can’t believe you mentioned Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs! That was such a big favorite of mine.
Anyway, on the Christian thing. My mother is a born-again Christian and very dedicated to her faith and belief in God; she might even qualify as a borderline “fundamentalist right-winger.” She used to be pretty extreme as far as not allowing us to listen to rock music and hiding my Motley Crue tapes, but that’s another thread. She LOVES Harry Potter. Two Christmases ago all she wanted was the complete set of Harry Potter books. I gave her a silver Hedwig bookmark. Balance says it best upthread; the books deal with ideas of good and evil in a mature, educated way. Family is of the utmost importance, particularly for Harry. My mother finds nothing objectionable in the presence of magic in the book. She loves the victory of good over evil, the portrayal of family (especially the Weasleys), Hagrid, and the amazing detail Rowling gives to the magical world.
A friend of mine who scoffed at Harry Potter is now hooked. He’s milking every last sentence out of Goblet of Fire.
Oh Jesus Christ! :rolleyes: (no pun intended)
It’s just a book.
And the best thing I can foresee coming out of the Harry Potter craze is that it will probably get kids interested in more original and enthralling fantasies, like Lord of the Rings.
I hated the hype. Well… maybe not hated. I mean I trusted the people who were telling me that it was good, but I just didn’t like how everyone was reading it and telling me I had to read it. So I didn’t read it. I figured it was probably pretty good, or at least had something appealing about it, but I didn’t bother to read it. I told people who were excited about it that I hadn’t read any of the books and that I didn’t plan to. In fact I was just irked by the cultishness of it and would probably read them once people backed off.
This summer it seemed like it had been over six months since anyone had gushed to me about the Harry Potter books so I decided to read them discreetly. I liked them, no big surprise. They were generally pretty good.
I really can’t say they are great, at least not compared with truly great books in the young adult genre, but they are pretty good. I do like that they don’t talk down too much and that they are pretty well thought out.
I didn’t exactly like The Order of the Phoenix as much as the others. I think it could have been better, but it is fine as far as that goes. I think it might become better in light of the next book, but it will always have some flaws I think.
Okay, hate to be the Grinch in Whoville, but I’ve read this whole thread through, and I gotta disagree with some of the statements.
Granted, true, anything that gets kids to put down the Gameboys and pick up a book is great. For that matter, anything that gets adults to put down the damn cellphone and pick up a book is great. No argument about that.
But I stopped reading the Harry Potter books after the third one because I finally realized that they aren’t very interesting. For adults, anyway. Well, for this adult.
I got tired of the moral simplicity of Harry’s world. Every thing good and noble and decent was on Harry’s side. Anyone or anything that is not, is evil and disgusting. Think about it. Ever encounter a Slytherin character who wasn’t brutish (a la Crabbe and Goyle) or malicious (a la Snape and Draco Malfoy)? The Gryffindors’ Common Room and dorm is a lofty tower, and their symbol is - what, a lion or a griffin or something like that? I can’t recall at the moment. Something noble, anyway. The Slytherins’ live in a cave, and are symbolized by a snake. Pretty subtle. And the Dursleys apparently have no redeeming values at all.
How many times has Harry broken the rules? Snuck out in his Invisibility Cloak? But when *he * does it, it’s okay; he’s the good guy, says so right there in the book. When any of the baddies break the rules, they’re punished. The only character who shows any sort of moral depth is Snape. He saved Harry’s life, remember, and was on the track of the evil Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in the first book. Even though he hates Harry.
The Harry Potter series are great books for children. Shows them the power of imagery, of fantasy, of characterization; introduces them to the wonderful treasure of English literature. But I suspect that as the kids who devour Harry grow older, they will be drawn to fiction with a little more depth.
Needless to say, all of the above is simply my own opinion, and de gustibus non disputantem est. Still, I hate to hear people talk about Rowling as if she’s the next J.R.R. Tolkien.
I have to completely disagree with you there. One of the points of Order of the Phoenix is that not everyone who’s evil is affiliated with the enemy and not everyone that’s on your side is a good person.
(mild spoilers for OOTP)
[spoiler]Witness Dolores Umbridge (evil but no affiliation to Voldemort) and Professor Snape (yes, he’s malicious, but he’s on Harry’s side).
And heck, there’s nothing noble about a lot that happens amongst the good guys in OOTP. Harry is a jerk because he’s 15 and he’s pissed that it’s his destiny and he’s being completely left out of the loop, Dumbledore admits to making mistakes in how he’s handled Harry up to this point, Sirius looks at Harry more as a friend than a charge, Harry and his friends aren’t safe in their own school, etc. Things aren’t nearly all black and white in Harry’s world.[/spoiler]
Wrong.
OOTP sheds some light on the Dursleys, and their full scope hasn’t yet been revealed.
Harry gets punished a lot. He ends up in detention with Gilderoy Lockheart, Snape, Filch, Hagrid, and Umbridge in book 5. Often multiple times. By contrast, Draco Malfoy gets away with a lot.
I do think that the whole “Gryffindor gets like a zillion points!” thing from Dumbledore is really, really lame.
She ain’t the next Tolkien, granted. And her world is incredibly simplistic and doesn’t hold up to really strong scrutiny.
Yet.
I think that with every book, JK introduces a little more moral shakiness, a little more confusion as to who’s right and wrong, who’s good and bad. The moral of the first two books was "There’s bad things, so let’s be good friends and stick together. The third one was “People oughtn’t judge others too quickly.” A bit more grown-up, really. And then the fourth one: “It can be really difficult to figure out what the right thing is to do, who the ‘good’ people are.” Book 5 basically says “Just because you’re ‘good’ doesn’t mean you’re perfect or right.”
She’s getting more shadowy as time goes on…but there’s still things about the books that really irk me. I love 'em to death, mostly because I love young adult books. I’m really hoping she touches on some of the (IMO) important issues: casual disregard of non-magical folk, for one thing.
A friend recommended them to me RIGHT before the hype really hit, and I didn’t read them.
When I started reading them, I really enjoyed them, and have looked forward to the release of each (though waiting for someone else to finish them so I could borrow theirs - budget’s not solid enough to blow $25 on a book right now).
I do think the borders between right and wrong and fair and unfair are nicely blurred. In OOTP, a girl who is suddenly getting a lot of attention due to the death of her parents (this isn’t really a spoiler, trust me) remarks to Harry that she doesn’t know how he can stand all of the attention.
It’s not all “Harry Potter is ultra-powerful and can do anything because his allies are Good” - he gets out of trouble because of that occasionally, true, but he also gets punished both fairly and unfairly. He’s loved by all one minute and feared by all the next - frequently because of events or people over which (or whom) he has no control. He gets hurt. His friends get hurt. Good guys die. Bad guys get away with stuff.
I’m not saying they’re Tolstoy for the lunchbox set. BUT…I still read children’s books. I still very clearly (sometimes TOO clearly) remember what it was like to be in school. I remember how some people who were total snots were popular, and some of the nicest people you could meet were distained. I remember morons being allowed to skip assignments and wonderful folks being given extra work, often both wholly according to happenstance. And vice-versa, on both accounts.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret is great if you have a pre-adolescent around and you want to help them gently make the transition into puberty. Then again, maybe I won’t…same thing. If you have a kid who’s got younger siblings, by all means, buy them the Fudge books. Harry Potter is (IMNPHO) a nice way to get kids involved in reading books for the fun of it. The books are engaging, the good guys usually come out on top, but not without some sort of struggle, and unfair things happen to everyone.
Let me try to put into words what I think makes Harry Potter so great.
The series transcribes exactly what it’s like to grow up. The first book is a boy at the very beginning of teenagedom. He is now adult enough to be introduced to the world, which seems magical and endlessly entertaining, but not adult enough to understand it. There are two categories of people: bad and good. His parents are basically deities. His eyes sparkle at everything around him.
As he gets deeper into the series, and lives in the world among these magical things, they begin to come into focus. He slowly learns the technicalities and rules of all the stuff he was so amazed at in the beginning. He finds some injustices and evils in the things he thought were pure wonder. He sees the same things over and over, but sees them in an ever-changing light. Then there’s the moment of his parents’ fall from grace, when he realizes that maybe they weren’t the faultless people he thinks they were. As all this goes on, and the hormones kick in, the boy becomes embiterred and cynical - and that’s what’s happened so far.
I enjoy seeing this transformation happen. Lord knows why, because it certainly wasn’t fun when it was happening to me. It’s my favorite thing about Harry Potter - well, that and the “getting kids into reading” thing.
I must confess to being a complete Potter-head.
I was initially turned off by all of the hype surrounding the release of “Goblet of Fire”. I had never heard of the series before and couldn’t imagine what the big deal was. I went to see the first movie not knowing the first thing about it, but prepared to be disappointed. Instead, I was enthralled. Immediately I grabbed the first book off of my daughter’s shelf and read it in one sitting. Then went on to the others. I’ve now read the whole series through several times.
So what makes it all so appealing? I can’t answer for anyone else, but here’s a few of the reasons I enjoy the books so much.
-
Rowling’s wizarding world is so complete. The idea that all of these magical things we write off as mythology are actually real is, of course, the foundation of any fantasy story. But Rowling’s concept lends it a bit more credibility than one usually sees. She taps into history and folklore and comes up with appealing explanations for the way things are. Having a governmental department set up to keep muggles from catching on to the actual existence of magic, wizards, dragons, and the lot is pure genius. Especially when the governmental body is overworked, understaffed, poorly administered, and universally sneered at.
-
The material ages with the audience. As many have noted, the books get thicker with each volume. But as they do, they become more complex. In “Sorcerer’s Stone” , the lines between good and evil are clearly drawn. As Harry matures, however, he comes to learn that the lines are really blurred. By the time you reach “Goblet of Fire”, he discovers that people on the same side of a conflict don’t always agree with one another, and don’t always like one another. In “Order of the Phoenix” , Harry sees vicious rivalries breaking out among the various factions who are all supposed to be “good.”
-
The characters are three-dimensional. Other than the fateful events of that long ago Halloween when You-Know-Who vanished, Harry’s a normal kid, not comfortable with the notion of being special or having a destiny. He throws temper tantrums and breaks rules, often for no particularly good reason. He’s frequently selfish, clueless and callous about the feelings of others. He makes snap decisions and acts without thinking things through. He wallows in self-pity. The truth is that there really ISN’T much about him that might be described as extraordinary. Which, of course, makes him such an appealing protagonist to all of those kids (overgrown and otherwise) who don’t see themselves as being extraordinary.
-
Like real life, the plot keeps you guessing. Some events unfold logically and over time. Others are sprung on you all of a sudden in ways that you could never predict. Even when the clues were there to be seen. Rowling sprinkles little details here and there that point to future developments, but the tapestry is so richly woven that the individual threads don’t stand out until they’re supposed to.
Is Harry Potter for everyone? Obviously not. NOTHING is for everyone. De gustibus non disputandum. But I’ve found the books to be very enriching and highly enjoyable. Even at the third and fourth reading.
Well, I’ve read books 1 through 5 now.
My opinion remains basically the same: Decent, but not worth all the hype.
One thing that’s nice is that Rowling clearly put a lot of effort into all the books, instead of cashing in with a crappy sequel.