Wow. I was 90% convinced that alloran was a troll. I gave 10% to the off-chance he was in fact a child genius with a rather large chip on his shoulder. Serves me right for playing the odds…
I hereby retract any accusations I may have made in this thread or any other.
[JET slinks away in shame…]
Hmm. Is this thread turning into a “who can read the quickest?” competition? I can read 777 characters per minute nah nah nah?
’punha - I still maintain that the more densely layered a novel, the longer it’ll take you to read it. Especially on the first read through, which context indicated we were talking about.
Hell - “The Moors Last Sigh” by Salmon Rushidie holds my record for longest read (whilst not being particularly distracted). It took me about 6 months! But the language was more like a 100,000 word poem than prose - beautiful and worth savouring.
pan
If this is indeed the case, I can think of no more damning argument for the book’s lack of substance.
No matter how skilled in language one is (and I’ll put my SAT verbal against anyone’s), no one can see all there is to see in 700+ pages of a book if there is anything to the book.
I thought Goblet was pretty flimsy. But if it gets kids to read at all, it’s ok by me. And if it leads children to read good books, so much the better.
Yeesh. Talking smack about my skillz apparantly doesn’t exempt me from butchering the language.
Let’s rephrase the following:
To read:
Apologies; carry on.
Anything that encourages kids to read can only be a good thing, IMO.
That said, I would daresay that the typical Terry Pratchett Discworld novel has three times the humor and four times the thought-provoking ideas as the typical Harry Potter novel.
Not that the HP novels aren’t good, but realistically, there are lots of other books which are even better.