Do you hate Harry Potter and his Crock of C***?

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Agathon

Of course Harry ******* is about class - it's basically Billy Bunter with magic or any of the other school stories from the Bunter era.

I'd forgotten all about Billy Bunter. I read them as a boy while wearing my little hat and blazer with the school crest. Cucumber sandwiches and the Henley regatta.....................ah .......................memories

How is it that you know them? I guess they're on the hate list for jealous commie-types who wish they could have such a life.

[lord of the mark]

"Seriously, Huck Finn is not about some kids wandering around, but it is more of a commentary of the society at the time. No such parallel exists in any of the Potter b"


well lets see,
1. Openness to talent versus purity of blood "it nots what you are, its what you do"
2. A political leadership that prefers to avoid a difficult and inconvenient truth
3. Voldemorts hatred of the group that did him ill, and his desire for genocidal revenge, versus those who oppose such vengeance


thats social and political issues.
But the book is far more about personal issues - 1. dealing with parental loss
2. The nature of depression
3. Friendship and loyalty
4. The nature of courage.
and several others.

So these books are more than just entertaining. And entertaining they are. And yes theres stuff in them that im sure the kids dont pick up on.

But no, i would go so far as to say there as good as huck finn. Though perhaps just as good as say, tom sawyer. And better than most anything else on the best seller lists.

And far better than what most kids AND adults spend their leisure time on. (i mean this is a site where lots of people think "Grand theft auto" is a good use of time - for kids - heaven help us - and for adults - heaven help us even more - and i havent seen agathon take on cultural products like that)

[Seeker]

You have to take those university courses where they show you WWI was caused by British public school boys reading too much of Boy's Own Paper and assorted other 'public school adventure' rags.

[Imran Siddiqui]

To the haters... the NY Times review:

Near the beginning of the fifth and latest installment of "Harry Potter," one of Harry's former teachers performs a "Disillusionment Charm" on him. It's a means of disguising his appearance and making him less visible to prying eyes, but it also serves as a metaphor for Harry's loss, in this volume, of his boyish illusions and for his teenage immersion into the ambiguities and perils of the grown-up world.

Already shorn of much of his innocence in his earlier battles with Lord Voldemort, this 15-year-old wizard is compelled, in "The Order of the Phoenix," to confront even more unsettling revelations about his relationship with that evil lord, as well as some uncomfortable truths about his own parents and the role that fate has chosen him to play.

This Harry Potter is less Prince Hal than a budding Henry V; less the callow boy in "The Sword in the Stone" and more of the young King Arthur.

A considerably darker, more psychological book than its predecessors, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" occupies the same emotional and storytelling place in the Potter series as "The Empire Strikes Back" held in the first "Star Wars" trilogy. It provides a sort of fulcrum for the series, marking Harry's emergence from boyhood, and his newfound knowledge that an ancient prophecy holds the secret to Voldemort's obsession with him and his family.

Though Harry is still the brave, decent boy we've met in the earlier novels, he's a much angrier character in these pages, beset not only by the pressures of trying to save the world from Voldemort and his Death Eaters, but also by ordinary adolescent frustrations and the burden of fame that his exploits at Hogwarts have placed on his skinny shoulders — a burden not dissimilar, in some respects, to the fame that his creator, J. K. Rowling, has experienced herself with the extraordinary popularity of this series. Harry is trailed by reporters, gossiped about by schoolmates and constantly told that he is special.

Because Harry is often in an irritable mood and spends much of the opening chapters brooding about his problems, "The Order of the Phoenix" gets off to a somewhat ponderous start.

There is also less humor in these pages than in the earlier books, and fewer Quidditch games; magic has become less of an art and more of a means of war. The benevolent headmaster of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, is curiously absent — or distant — for large portions of the book, and so, for that matter, is Harry's Falstaffian friend, Hagrid, the school's gamekeeper. Instead, Harry and his pals, Ron and Hermione, must contend with the noxious omnipresence of Dolores Jane Umbridge, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and a government spy, who conceals beneath her fluffy pink cardigan the cold heart and bureaucratic soul of a Grand Inquisitor.

Harry finds himself subject to a series of alarming, Kafkaesque dreams — filled with long corridors and closed doors — while the grown-up members of the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society organized by Dumbledore to combat Lord Voldemort, find themselves battling incompetence, denial and cover-ups by the Ministry of Magic. Dread hovers over the novel, as everyone awaits the next move of He Who Must Not Be Named and ponders the loyalties of others, like Ron's brother Percy; Sirius's petulant house elf, Kreacher; and the perennially nasty Potions professor, Snape.

What Ms. Rowling is trying to do in the novel's first half is to delineate both the increasingly grim world in which her characters find themselves after the return of Lord Voldemort in the series' previous installment (Year 4: "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") and the awkward emotional changes her characters are going through as they grow up, something rarely addressed by this sort of children's story, which usually leaves its heroes frozen in a single snapshot in time. The themes of self-sacrifice and betrayal sounded in previous volumes are amplified here. New light is shed on Harry's relationship with his awful Muggle (i.e., nonmagical) relatives the Dursleys, and as Ms. Rowling has said in recent interviews, a character close to Harry dies.

Although it takes a while for the gears of this immensely long novel to mesh fully, the author's bravura storytelling skills and tirelessly inventive imagination soon take over, braiding together the mundane and the marvelous, the psychological and the allegorical with consummate authority and ease. Even as Harry discovers that his teachers and mentors are fallible, he must question how his own weaknesses — anger, pride and ambition — may be leading him into Voldemort's clutches. Even as he tries to comprehend the terrible fallout that Voldemort's return could have on the world, he must search the past for answers as to how to thwart him. And come to understand, as his beloved godfather, Sirius, tells him, that the world "isn't split into good people and Death Eaters," that there are more ambiguities to grown-up life than he imagined.

One of the things that has made the Potter books so appealing to children and many adults is Ms. Rowling's magpie ability to take archetypes and plot points from myriad sources — myths, fairy tales, children's classics and movies — and alchemize them into something new. The Potter novels are, at once, detective stories (with Harry and his friends playing the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew all at the same time), moral fables, coming-of-age chronicles and action adventure epics. Harry has been written to embody a daunting gallery of associations (including Luke Skywalker, Telemachus and even Jesus), while Voldemort vibrates with the auras of Darth Vader, Hitler and Milton's Satan, among others.

Although Voldemort, who is trying to get his clammy hands on a powerful new weapon in this volume, can seem a bit cardboardy at times, like a silent-movie villain, Ms. Rowling has made Harry such a flesh-and-blood character that the reader has an instant sense of recognition. It's as if the boy next door had been miraculously transported from the Muggle world we all know to a magical realm where dementors and thestrals lurk, a world where people can pour their extra thoughts into a "Pensieve" or whisk themselves from one place to another with a Portkey.

As this volume, like its predecessors, attests, Ms. Rowling has imagined this universe in such minute and clever detail that we feel that we've been admitted to a looking-glass world as palpable as Tolkien's Middle Earth or L. Frank Baum's Oz. The wizards, witches and Muggles who live there share complicated, generations-old relationships with one another and inhabit a place with traditions, beliefs and a history all its own — a Grimm place where the fantastic and fabulous are routine, but also a place subject to all the limitations and losses of our own mortal world.

[lord of the mark]

"There is also less humor in these pages than in the earlier books, and fewer Quidditch games; magic has become less of an art and more of a means of war. "

"Even as he tries to comprehend the terrible fallout that Voldemort's return could have on the world, he must search the past for answers as to how to thwart him. And come to understand, as his beloved godfather, Sirius, tells him, that the world "isn't split into good people and Death Eaters," that there are more ambiguities to grown-up life than he imagined."


A Harry Potter for post 9/11??


Looking forward to reading it, whenever my daughter is done with it.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by GePap
I used to "hate" HP without reading it, for many of the reasnons stated here. Then, in my unemployment, I ran out of reading material, an my sister hapened to won the four books, so I said, why not? I finished the 4 books in the next 3 days.

Did you hear that!?!

Harry Potter: the preferred reading of unemployed layabouts!!!!!

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat

I quite enjoyed that. What happens next?

The rest of the proposal. I would have posted a real paper but I haven't actually written one for three years which was before I got this machine. I wrote them on a 486 that I got for free. I have all my papers in hard copy which I keep meaning to get scanned.

These are somewhat more entertaining. In one I defend Plato against charges of totalitarianism, and in another I talk about Wittgenstein's view of pain statements.

Boris: it's written like that for two reasons. (1) That is part of a draft - I completed the final copy on a computer at varsity; and (2) If you don't keep qualifying things some Professor keeps saying, "What about X?" or "You've claimed too much here".

Besides, one of my profs admires my clear and concise style.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by SpencerH


I'd forgotten all about Billy Bunter. I read them as a boy while wearing my little hat and blazer with the school crest. Cucumber sandwiches and the Henley regatta.....................ah .......................memories

How is it that you know them? I guess they're on the hate list for jealous commie-types who wish they could have such a life.

I got given a load of 1950s Boys' Annuals when I was a kid. They were chock full of school stories.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Agathon


Did you hear that!?!

Harry Potter: the preferred reading of unemployed layabouts!!!!!

Then as a Philosophy prof, why aren't you on the bandwagon yet? I mean, the two things are just so darn close...

[Arrian]

That's nothing. I got to book 8 of Robert Jordan's turgid Wheel of Time series. I knew the first book wasn't nearly as good as the fanboys had told me, but I kept reading because they said "It gets so much better!" Not only did it not get better, it got so very, very much worse. I now consign those books to the gutter of fantasy writing and name Jordan the biggest literary fraud of the genre.

I could not agree more, Boris. I too made it to book 7 or 8 before giving up in disgust.

Robert Jordan sucks ass.

-Arrian

[JohnT]

[shameless plug]

Speaking of quality novels (regardless of what Agathon believes ), don't forget to vote for the Alternate History novel for August's SF book discussion.

[/shameless plug]