“Of course, it’s not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it’s an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you’d better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you’ll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn’t sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott’s beans, sour-grapes flavor.” — Harry Potter and the Death of Reading, washingtonpost.com

Comments

1. fyngyrz on 2007-07-16 11:13:07 wrote: Rowling is low grade prose for kids. The movies proffer the additional benefit of eye candy - the school, the trains, etc. Suspend your disbelief, turn off your literary pretensions, disable your sensitivity to anachronism, lock out your knowledge of how teenage kids actually behave, and Potter is a good time for all. [cough.] If you’d like to read some fabulous stuff along these lines (and find out where Rowling likely lifted a good deal of her “ideas”), dig up some Terry Pratchett books. I suggest “Good Omens” for a fabulous introduction to Pratchett’s humor. My (beautiful and talented) sweetheart agrees. She also points out that a good portion of the “Diskworld” series deals with a school called “The Unseen University”, and that the similarities between the Pratchett book “Mort” and the Harry Potter series are so strong as to be… quite unlikely. Anyway, Pratchett FTW, YMMV, etc.

2. David on 2007-07-18 00:02:48 wrote: That is a wonderful and thoughtful article. Thanks for the link. I’m Potter-weary too, having read the first six books to my son. I think they are imaginative in the details but the sheer endless sameness of the prose style has worn me down. The article is right in claiming that book-publishing now needs events and brands like any other form of entertainment. But there is so much diversity still out there - it’s just gone underground. One of the pleasures of blog-reading is to experience that diversity.

3. Exer on 2007-07-29 13:28:33 wrote: After reading the first 3 Potter novels, I too was quite worn out by the repetitiveness of the plots. I had even wrote some pretty critical reviews of them. The total sameness just got to me, it always went something like this: the kids go to school; something terrible crops up; kids take care of it; kids go home. Each book followed that, and at first I was rather disappointed. Then I realized one ultimate truth: the series is about school and school-age kids. School inherently IS repetitive. You go year after year, and you get drilled with the same mindless subjects until they finally sink in. You might have 12 years of “math” in a row. Of course it’s slightly different each year – as are the Potter books – but that doesn’t hide the fact that basically the same theme is always repeating. Once I “got” the fact that a series about kids going to school almost can’t help but be repetitive on certain points, I enjoyed the later books much more. If someone wrote a book about MY school years, it would be monotonous to the point of boring people to tears.