Harry Potter Fans: Why Do You Read Them?

[CutiePie2000]

Originally posted by Sistermadly
Have you read any of the Lemony Snicket books? Another great series to try.

Yes, I have! They're pretty good, too. I have read the first 7.
His "real name" is Daniel Handler, and I read 'Basic Eight' by him (which I thought was a stinker....took me forever to get through)

[MysticCat]

-- I've always liked the fantasy/magical reality genre (provided it's well-written).

-- JKR is a fantastic writer. Her words are well-chosen, and she rarely wastes a word. She draws on older forms of literature -- the English boarding house novel and the fantasy/magical reality tale -- in a way that demonstrates her complete familiarity with what has gone before, but that uses existing elements with utter originality to create a compelling story of good vs. evil.

-- JKR has an almost Dickensian gift for naming characters. For example, Draco (Latin for "dragon," which in medieval understanding is considered a big snake, perfect for Slytherin) Malfoy (Old French for "bad faith"). Or Argus Filch, the caretaker who keeps an eye on everything at Hogwarts and who is named for the 100-eyed giant of Greek mythology. Remus Lupin's name should have given away his secret early on -- I could have kicked myself for not catching it.

-- The book is full of characters that one cares about and that are fun to hate.

-- They are smart books, with many levels. As some have already noted, JKR deals with some serious issues without preaching.

-- If you know some Latin (or a few other languages), it's fun to decipher the meanings of various spells and incantations. (If you don't know Latin or these other languages -- she even uses Aramaic -- check out the Lexicon at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/.) If you know medieval literature, you can pick out all sorts of symbolic elements.

-- How can one not like a book with Ernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans?

-- They are great fun to read out loud, which my 5-year-old demands on a regular basis. (He is convinced that when he turns 11, he'll get a letter telling him he has been admitted to Hogwarts, despite being Muggle-born. He already says he wants to be Harry Potter for Halloween -- I'm trying to convince him to be a little unusual and be Harry wearing Quidditch robes instead of school robes.)

[SilverTurtle]

Originally posted by MysticCat81
like a book with Ernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans?

-- They are great fun to read out loud, which my 5-year-old demands on a regular basis. (He is convinced that when he turns 11, he'll get a letter telling him he has been admitted to Hogwarts, despite being Muggle-born. He already says he wants to be Harry Potter for Halloween -- I'm trying to convince him to be a little unusual and be Harry wearing Quidditch robes instead of school robes.)

That is cute! And I think Harry in Quidditch robes is far cooler than just Harry anyways.

[Sistermadly]

Based on the comments here, I bought Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Saturday. And while I couldn't put the book down (read it in one day), I can't honestly say that I'm enthralled with the series so far. I keep waiting for that magical *something* to jump out and pull me in, and it just hasn't.

You guys were right: I liked Azkaban much better than the first two. It was a bit darker, and seeing the kids acting out like surly teenagers was fun to watch. I think that my bias against fantasy is affecting my ability to enjoy the books; the last fantasy series I read and enjoyed were part of Robert Aspirin's "MYTH" series.

I'm not sure if I'll stick with it since the waiting list for the most recent books is so long at the library, and I don't want to line J.K. Rowling's pockets any more than they already have been.

[Sistermadly]

Saw this on a listserv for children's literature. Offered as information -- I don't particularly agree with this viewpoint.

Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
by A.S. Byatt

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and — a much harder question — why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.

The easy question first. Freud described what he called the "family romance," in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real "real" family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.

The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the drowsy years between 7 and adolescence. In "Order of the Phoenix," Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the book becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his late (and "real") father was not a perfect magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits.

In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers.

Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing "secondary worlds." Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from "Star Wars" to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing.

The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.

They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death. These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey latency fantasies?

Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

[Not a Mezzo]

I didn't want anything to do with Harry Potter when the books first blew up. I thought it was one of those trends like Pokemon or Power Rangers and wanted nothing of it.

Then a cousin of my mom's asked me if I'd read the books. She told me that she had bought the first one for her son and daughter, and had to read it first to be sure it was okay for bedtime. She quickly became hooked, which seemed like a pretty good endorsement to me.

I bought the first book and really enjoyed. Got the second book, thought it was great. The third book, though, is my favorite. I love how Rowling pulls the reader in and makes you care about these people she's created, without seeming to do a thing. The writing is simple, touching, and genuinely funny at times, which is a great change of pace from the smarmy and sometimes self-congratulating smart literature you find many people reading.

I guess what I really like about HP is that it's direct without being too simple, and deep without being preachy. A fun read that also lets you learn about human nature.

Besides, the word "muggle" is so cute.

[MysticCat]

Originally posted by Sistermadly
Saw this on a listserv for children's literature. Offered as information -- I don't particularly agree with this viewpoint.

Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
by A.S. Byatt

... Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

... Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

... In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery.

I agree with much of this article, including the "roots" of Harry Potter. But as for the sections I quoted above and others like them, I have to wonder: Has this writer actually read the books? Way off base, I think.

[sugar and spice]

There is a reponse to the above article on salon.com:

http://salon.com/books/feature/2003/...ing/index.html