grown-ups who are really into harry potter

always telling me to read harry potter

You don't need to read them! That's what the films are for.

i work with these people. they're all boring

I don't want to read or see anything, I want them to shut up about it.

i dont wanna sound like a dick but seriously these are kids books and theyre like 800 pages long and theres all these retards in line with like lightning bolts drawn on their foreheads what the fuck about this appeals to a sane adult xp lol theyre my co-workers too

i want them to not accuse me of "being crazy" or ask me "What's wrong with you?"

adults really into harry potter >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> adults really into accusing harry potter of fostering witchcraft in our schools

I got intensely annoyed with former co-worker, when I said I was going to see the fifth film, and replied "oh, I've read the book" as if it were Finnegan's Wake or something.

I read and enjoyed the first four books but I'm buggered if I'm going to waste time reading the rest and spoiler the films.

and god forbid you mention that youre reluctant to read a bunch of 800 page kids books or you get accused of lacking their bullshit sense of wonder or being some square adult to their whimsical peter pan self-image

how come the people who get all defensive-cat.jpg HOW DARE YOU DISMISS THEM AS KIDS BOOKS THEYRE JUST GOOD BOOKS IS ALL never actually read books intended for adults

"You can't criticise it if you haven't read it" - FUCK OFF!!!

The first four books are actually really good reads. Then it's like she starts specifically catering for her nerdier fans and things become dreadfully convoluted, at times reading like an RPG sourcebook.

They make you feel like a kid again!

I read the first and third ones. They're well-written but they are total kiddie books; anyone telling you otherwise is fooling themselves.

What's funny about these people is that they'd never read some adult book you suggested for whatever whiny pleased-with-own-ignorance reason yet think you are a snob if you don't want to waste days reading their fantasy tripe.

It's not even that they are kid books. I tried reading that kind of magicy shit when I was a kid and I didn't like it. May as well read D&D books.

the last one came out on a saturday, right? someone at work came up to me monday morning--and keep in mind, i had never talked with her previously about these books ever:

"So. What do you think so far? Did you finish?"
Me: "Did I finish what?"
"Harry Potter! It came out Saturday. . ."
Me: "Oh, I haven't read those. . ."
"WHAT OMG U CRAZY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. . ." etc etc

I read all kinds of brain-dead media tie-in fiction that pretty much does exactly what the Harry Potter books do, only in about 80% fewer words.

got girl i used to go out with mad into this even tho i never cared about it myself and she was unconvinced until i bought her the first book as a present. weird.

and what about seven years late to this particular party

Finnegans Wake does not have an apostrophe in its title.

hey guess what i think i AM allowed to be smug about reading shit written above a 4th grade level - at least the dudes i knew in high school who never moved out of their moms house to just smoke weed & play xbox all day dont pretend theyre recapturing the magic of childhood when they do it

They're well-written

Not particularly. The best thing about them is the inventiveness and (in the first four at least) clever plotting.

There's a film of Finnegans Wake?

and what about seven years late to this particular party

-- jon /via/ chi 2.0, Tuesday, March 25, 2008 12:17 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

tell that to people who want me to read harry potter

Dan how is that attempt to review every single Doctor Who novel going, anyway?

May as well read D&D books.

this is part of what weirds me out about the whole thing, it would be like if my parents and their co-workers had also been reading Dragonlance books when i was a kid.

less dragonlance more narnia.

I'm not saying you're wrong, thankfully no one around me seems to be talking about these anymore.

Getting the impression that a high proportion of people who are vehemently anti-reading Harry Potter are people who don't read fantasy/genre fic to begin with? Not including Dan Perry, obv.

xxp I am still reading Dragonlance. Or, well, the slightly more literary equivalent(s).

lol what are you guys talking abt these people are delightful to zing for reading childrens books

just take a condescending mocking tone and go from there

Finnegans Wake does not have an apostrophe in its title.

There are all sorts of things wrong with my post there. I weep for my basic literacy.

i think the last time i mentioned being annoyed by this phenomenon i got into an argument with laurel about YA books?

xp, ha

There's a film of Finnegans Wake?

Joseph Strick strikes again?

The world of make-believe makes for a great escape for some adults! Why rain on their parade?!?!?

on old-ilx this thread would have a lot more butthurtedness by now.

Then it's like she starts specifically catering for her nerdier fans and things become dreadfully convoluted, at times reading like an RPG sourcebook.

ha if only...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/BoVDCover.gif

good response when asked if you read harry potter:

oh is that that kids book wheres theres like magic and then everything turns out ok in the end?

Dan how is that attempt to review every single Doctor Who novel going, anyway?

sonotgonnahappen.jpg (mostly because I lost a couple ;_;)

I include "clever plotting" in with the things I enumerate when I decide whether a book is well-written or not; what's the point of excluding it?

(holy shit people be bitching about Harry Potter)

i think it's fine if people read them--i just don't want people who do read and ejnjoy HP to pitch a fit when i tell them that i don't read them. it's happened twice, both times with grown adults.

I generally put Harry Potter and Buffy into the same bucket: well-done stuff in genres I like that I really couldn't care less about.

i dont read 'fantasy fiction' normally and i read 'MATURE ADULT LITERATURE,' and i dont get on people about 'omg u must read' but these books are fun and i dont regret having read them

on old-ilx this thread would have a lot more butthurtedness by now.

On old ILX, Harry Potter would not have had an extra five or so years to ascend to the level of Mandatory Culture.

I generally put Harry Potter and Buffy into the same bucket: well-done stuff in genres I like that I really couldn't care less about.

-- HI DERE, Tuesday, March 25, 2008 4:22 PM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

^

its 'trash' but not in a bad way

Getting the impression that a high proportion of people who are vehemently anti-reading Harry Potter are people who don't read fantasy/genre fic to begin with? Not including Dan Perry, obv.

-- Laurel, Tuesday, March 25, 2008 12:19 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i like cs lewis & re-read the narnia books as an adult 4-5 years ago & absolutely enjoyed them

i mean its pretty easy to trash this stuff, what normal person wants to spend all their time getting captain save a ho about books that are largely for children? but so was 'the hobbit' and i still like that (yes the hobbit is better but im just saying)

Ethan hearts Christian propaganda!

I don't really like "MATURE ADULT LITERATURE", actually, only the adventure/quest narrative really interests me. I'm pretty okay with that, though.

(e.g., reading Stephen King as a pre-teen was in no sense a "gateway" to my reading "better" stuff later, but not the worst way to learn basic stuff about how to read a novel)

^^^^ this

Man I devoured Stephen King books in junior high and I really think it strengthened my love of reading, not to mention being able to speed up my reading a bit.

magic is real fyi

The Stephen King thing was my hook into reading too... I kind of miss those days of staying up really late and reading so fast that I'd sometimes miss important stuff because I just had to find out What Happened Next.

hmm I never had this Stephen King period. If there was anything that I read (or MADE me read) in that eager-page-flipping way it was probably Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander

Ha! Are you sure it wasn't King's book on writing that taught how to read King's books? (After I read that I suddenly understood King's recurring motifs of doctor characters, characters who represented King's abusive/absent dad, themes of alcoholism, etc...) I think it was called Danse Macabre.

ha I had a King period and a Lloyd Alexander period (ha, and a Michener period)

A bit like Shakey Mo here in that it wasn't King for me, but that both Tolkien and Alexander were huge faves. A fair amount of standardized "gateway" novels passed me by at the time (for instance, I did read, of all things, Gravity's Rainbow when I was in eleventh grade as an assignment from my English teacher, but only read The Great Gatsby just the other week).

what is michener like?? i've always been curious

loved the shit out of stephen king as a kid though read all this classic period shit

I did a sixth grade book report on Christine.

Very detailed.

His basic plots are: humanity is obsessed with sex, religion, power and control, decent people aren't perfect, if you're lucky you get some space to live out your life in, and there's always maps.

Michener was horribly boring iirc. My dad had Alaska sitting around forever so I picked it up one boring summer day and couldn't get very far into it before giving up.

(That was to Matt about Michener.)

Pratchett doesn't get a lot of love on this board (aside from Dan Perry :)) but my gateway series was Discworld. haven't read a new one in years though.

Oh I totally loved King and Michener when I was in Jr. H.S.

Ha, yeah, these all sound like hallmarks of whatever that age is where you're figuring out how to regularly read adult-type books for pleasure.

Like just to get really obvious and detailed about this: I can remember being in maybe middle school and reading King or Koontz or something and coming across novel techniques -- like radical POV shifts or stylistic tricks having to do with, say, interior monologue -- that seemed strange and striking and mind-blowing. Somewhere along the line you learn that some of those things are common or basic, some of them start to seem actively cheap, etc., but you've got to learn them for the first time someplace, and in my head King was still really charmingly good in that one where some sections were narrated by a dog.

(HP books seriously don't have anything remotely formal going on with them that I remember, although I've been told the later ones are a lot more interior? But, you know, there are things you get used to that aren't formal.)

grown-ups who are really into breaking down the formal structure of harry potter

The later HP books are more complicated than the earlier ones, but I don't remember any interior monologues or POV shifts or anything like you're mentioning. Then again, I glanced at the end of the last book the other day and realized I didn't remember a whole lot of it, even though I've read through it twice.

xp ENBB, you read Michener in Jr high and I'm 37 and I have not read ONE! ;_;

"King was still really charmingly good in that one where some sections were narrated by a dog."

Which one is this? Does he literally go "rowf rowf rowf! Rowf arowf rowf rowf roouuuf? Rowf!"

That's gotta be Cujo.

Which is, btw, and incredibly dark and depressing book.

I don't remember having any author phases. Good Omens (6th grade) is the first 'adult' book that sticks out to me (that wasn't a classic like A Connecticut Yankee/Tom Sawyer/A Christmas Carol) or something completely awful in hindsight (I read the first dozen Xanth novels before starting junior high).

Which one is this? Does he literally go "rowf rowf rowf! Rowf arowf rowf rowf roouuuf? Rowf!"

lolz would read

i think that was a Koontz book actually

I'm thinking of one of the King "fantasy" ones -- Eye of the Dragon, maybe? I dunno, there was a whole bit from a dog's perspective where the dog was following a scent, and all the scents were described visually as like threads and patches of color the dog was navigating.

i want to check out michener just cuz i associate it with "grown up books" i used to be curious about when i was a boy.

anyone read "the thorn birds"? that's another one i think of in that same vein...and the puzo godfather book

In retrospect I guess the dog didn't actually narrate so much as the narration was from the dog's perspective? I dunno, it was a long time ago

i remember a pretty good NYRB article from the early 2000s where the author tried to make a case for king as the 20th century melville, what with his obsessive detailing of rural / suburban life in maine in the 60s to 80s

nabisco - now I'm really curious which King book you mean! It sounds familiar, but...

btw in looking through a list of King books in order to sort out which one I was thinking of, I was surprised to find this

My Pretty Pony - 1989 - Drama - 100pp - Limited edition

An elderly man, his death rapidly approaching, takes his young grandson up onto a hill behind his house and gives the boy his pocketwatch. Then, standing among falling apple blossoms, the man also "gives instruction" on the nature of time: how when you grow up, it begins to move faster and faster, slipping away from you in great chunks if you don't hold tightly onto it. Time is a pretty pony, with a wicked heart.

his obsessive detailing of rural / suburban life in maine in the 60s to 80s

One of his core strengths, and a core strength of any 'genre' writer -- namely, what is slipped in under the overall umbrella they're writing in. (Looking at Le Guin, for instance -- her anthropology training completely informs nearly everything she writes.)

you would hope people have moved beyond looking at le guin as a sci fi writer

though you'd hope the same thing of samuel r delany but it seems like he's just moved from one ghetto (sci fi) to another (queer lit)

I'd certainly hope but alas, the world disappoints.

slipping that reference in there because samuel r delany's "stars in my pocket like grains of sand" was pretty much the first "serious lit" book i read as a teenager

I'm trying to remember what my first Delany books were and I think they were the Neveryon books. Which probably *really* caused my head to spin more than I knew at the time (I was, what, sixteen?).

never got the appeal of Delany

The only person I know who is really into Harry Potter above the age of 18 is the same person who got together with a group of friends, got dressed up and took a limo to the newest James Bond movie and may possibly be the product of inbreeding.

got dressed up and took a limo to the newest James Bond movie

wkiw

you know sometimes inbreeding creates geniuses. like, mad geniuses, but still.

Over in this bit about HP being more openly embraced by conservative Christians these days, this bit in the comments:

Kid parolees working at the Beat Within juvie magazine in San Francisco beg to differ: They call HP a homie. "Look," one says, "he's got serious beef. He's all hood--foster family after parents get themselves killed, sidecar called Dobby who's in rags and always getting clowned on. And don't foget all them drugs helping him work magic and fly."

Wow it's too bad I wasn't at work today and I missed this thread, otherwise I could have gotten absolutely nothing done at work today! Good job, everybody.

Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica juggled heavy duty space opera and fantastical, magic elements. But his next project will leave space behind, in favor of a world of pure magic, in the vein of Harry Potter for adults.

According to Deadline, Moore's new project is "described as an adult Harry Potter set in a world ruled not by science but by magic," and he's making it for NBC. And Sony, which signed a development deal with Moore back in May, is pretty serious about moving forward with this — there are nearly $2 million in "pilot and series penalties," meaning Sony has to pay up to $2 million if the show doesn't film both a pilot and an ongoing series.

Ronald D Moore could make a puppet rock opera interpretation of Jersey Shore and I would eat it with a frakking spoon

But I'm a ridiculous Moore & HP Stan so....

this thread is completely fuckin hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDMVfFgykP8

http://topcultured.com/15-hot-harry-potter-fans/

i was trying to think who was more fun to bait between adult harry potter nerds and people who do status updates about not caring about harry potter and then i realized that i was the toxic sludge clot in the heart of twitter

On the bus today, passed by a house that someone had named 'Dumbledores'. AN ADULT DID THAT FFS