>Harry Potter and the Sorcer's Stone.pdf
>ctrl+f: Stretched his legs
>1308 results
Wtf
>>7814845
Why are you acting surprised? Just Kidding Rowling is a shit writer.
i never read HP as a kid (parents opposed witchcraft)
Where does it stack up in the world of children's literature?
>>7814875
super average, no significant faults or merits either way.
>>7814875
Only worth reading as a kid so you could fit in a little more with the normies.
Epithets are literary devices used in Greek mythos. Why is it OK for Homer to say grey-eyed Athena a million times but when a female does the same she gets shit on?
>>7814913
>implying homer wasn't female
W E W
E
W
>>7814913
Men on suicide watch
>>7814899
when they came out my friends and their families were split into two camps about it:
>HP is a promotion of witchcraft and a sign of the end times
>HP is ok
>>7814875
its good, like roald dahl but more fantastical, dont let these memers convince you otherwise
>>7814875
It's not really very entertaining if you're an adult, already well read in real /lit/erature, and coming into it fresh. Harold Bloom may have been bullshitting about the "stretched his legs" shit, but he's right about Rowling's writing being full of cliches and her characters being boring. And fantasy nerds are right about her magic and world being fulled with bullshit. I guess if you just lower your expectations and remind yourself "It's just for kids!" but there's just a lot of better books, even better children's books, you could be reading.
>>7814918
how rural can you get
>>7814949
It's not a rural thing, it's an American thing.
>>7814957
It wasn't an American thing; it was a Christian thing.
>>7814875
>Where does it stack up in the world of children's literature?
If you compare it to the current world of children's literature, it's average to good. The first couple of books are more whimsical and childish, then it gets into standard fantasy mode, until the last two books that are a bit of a drag.
If your world of children's literature includes classics such as Stevenson, Alcott or Dumas, even in adapted form, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
>>7814973
I realise the first HP is life 200 pages long now, so Just Kidding Rowling would have used "strectched his legs" more than five times per page.
Bloom is a fucking retarded liar. He's a worthless critic.
>>7814913
Dude the Iliad and the Odyssey are extremely old and were originally told orally. Those poems and Harry Potter are incomparable.
>>7814986
>literally mansolaining
>>7815005
>>7815005
>>7814875
I do not think Harry Potter ranks with the children's fantasy classics, Narnia, The Dark is Rising, and Prydain.
I enjoyed reading HP as an adult but there are clear flaws: angst isn't a good look and there's so much of it, overhearing everything as the main plot device, the time turner for Hermione's courseload, quidditch scoring, elements ripped off directly from Diana Wynn Jones, etc. I'm not up in arms over JKR's revisionist characterizations but I do think it's silly.
>>7815043
>I do not think Harry Potter ranks with the children's fantasy classics, Narnia, The Dark is Rising, and Prydain.
why is it so much more popular than all the others you listed then
>>7814845
What's actually more annoying in the HP books is the constant refereces to blushing. Whenever a character gets embarssed in any minor way, their "cheeks turn a shade of bright pink" or whatever. All the time. That shit doesn't happen in real life.
>>7815043
Harry Potter is better than Narnia
>>7814845
I was actually extremely impressed with the prose in the half blood prince. that first chapter was amazing.
>>7814845
I actually ctrled and fed and got 0 results.
I mean it's shit, but this isn't a thing.
>>7814934
I just want something long where I can enjoy enjoy the characters and pretend to have friends. I haven't found anything yet, at least anything that works.
>>7815133
Try Pickwick Papers. Or watch any good tv show.
>>7814983
This cannot be emphasized enough
>>7815070
Narnia had a lot of breadth: he created and destroyed their world, adventures took place in different settings, there were lots of interesting characters like Reepicheep the valiant mouse who gave up his sword. I'm not at all Christian but that subtext gives depth to the series. The characters don't just fight an enemy like in HP but are questing towards a higher goal, grace.
HP is simply hunt the mcguffins and kill the big bad.
>>7815133
HP is fine for that purpose.
>>7815133
Animorphs my nigga
>>7815133
Please read the Redwall books
I had no friends as a kid those helped a lot
>>7814919
>jk rowling on par with based Roald Dahl
Triggered my niggered
>>7814845
shit book is shit, more news at 11.
I liked them as a child and adolescent, but never revisited them after that. My favourite children's book series was "His dark materials", shit was dope.
>>7815070
holy fuck no
>>7814917
No one cares about male suicide.
>>7814983
when did he lie
>>7815070
I can't help but agree, I really, really fucking hated Narnia. Read a couple of the Harry Potter books a couple of months ago since I never read them as a kid for who knows what reason, it seems like the kind of thing that I would have enjoyed reading I guess. But as a kid I just preferred to play with toy animals and create characters and worlds for them rather than read.
>>7814934
>but there's just a lot of better books, even better children's books, you could be reading.
What do you suggest?
>>7815689
you should ctrl+f the text, not the cover m8
>>7815133
i've been reading franzen's new book purity and pretending the main character is my qt millennial gf
>>7815849
How many books of Narnia did you read? Tb.h I didn't like Lion/Witch but the series picked up from there.
>>7814983
Yeah he was relevant once upon a time (Anxiety of Influence) but he's just been a cranky reactionary since the 80's, reflexively hating anything that gets read by more than a dozen people a year.
As for J.K.Rowling, I think she was quite good in the earlier books which are more whimsical and fairy-tale like, and then things slump when she tried her hand at "mature" writing in the final two books or so. Her success wasn't a total accident of fate - she had a good sense of what kids wanted, her child-characters were generally believable, and she had a good sense of atmosphere - Hogwarts was carefully crafted ideal-dream-world for kids, especially suburban kids who get pretty surprisingly romantic about that kind of stuff.
In addition to the aforementioned issues (the time-turners, literally mindless Quidditch rules) which bug adults more than kids, I think that the House-system was one of her worst ideas. Like, in HP-verse you're apparently either an autistic-savant, useless and kind, a frat-boy or Literally Evil. Like, the whole concept of Slytherin was absurd, those kids should have been auto-funneled to Magic Prison.
>>7814845
isn't it like 200 pages at most? thats like 7 times a page
>>7814845
>>7815874
>>7815937
>>7815898
I'm inclined to agree. I enjoyed discovering the magical world as Harry did, and it definitely had the potential to be some Dahl-like thing.
She just got worse as she went on though. Power creep, McGuffin quests, and, for a series that talks a lot about forgiveness and love, there's an awful lot of Black White morality. All the bad guys were fanatical racists, and there was no depth to them. I suppose that's what the kids would see, but still, it would have been nice to see a character that reflected the KKK or something;
>Ugly, untalented wizard
>ostracized by wizard society
>Clerk at ministry
>Death eaters start up
>"I joined because they were the only friends I'd ever had"
>>7815898
>In addition to the aforementioned issues (the time-turners, literally mindless Quidditch rules) which bug adults more than kids, I think that the House-system was one of her worst ideas. Like, in HP-verse you're apparently either an autistic-savant, useless and kind, a frat-boy or Literally Evil. Like, the whole concept of Slytherin was absurd, those kids should have been auto-funneled to Magic Prison.
This would have been a problem if Rowling had an inkling of consistency in her worldbuilding. Instead the smartest kid in the school and the friendliest kid in the school are in the protagonist house because reasons.
>>7815133
Ulysses. I'm not serious. By the end, Bloom will feel like an intimate friend.
>>7815561
Redwall and the few that are directly related to the first book are all decent.
I remember the original, Mossflower and Mattimeo all being enjoyable. The others I read, not so much.
>>7816115
Perhaps we perceive them this way because that's how Harry perceives them?
Although it's pretty fucking obvious that without Hermione, everybody else would have been fucked in the arse by Voldy and his goons.
>>7815898
Quidditch is so badly thought out it beggars belief. It's a sport entirely designed to make the protagonist look like a badass, fair enough, but it's not even done in a logical way.
It's effectively two different games, with 12 players that aren't seekers effectively playing their own futile game while Harry and some nameless jobber (or Malfoy) drift around doing fuck all until they have to win the game.
Additionally, there's no tactical nous applied to the seeker role. For instance, they could initiate 'false chases' where they pretend to see the snitch somewhere maybe...
>>7814875
Really good children literature in the first 4 and a half books, shit "mature" literature in the end of the fifth and last two.
>>7814875
It allows for vivid imagination within the mind of children. It's not written well. The story is meh. But JK herself changed her writing style has her initial readers aged.
That's why this series is so impactful. For a lot of kids it's their first experience with their mind being filled with another world through the written word.
If you read it now you still might be able to rekindle that childish gift of not having reality crush your fucking soul every day. It's a fun little world. Take a shot at it if you want.
>>7814875
A Series Of Unfortunate Events was much better.
>>7814973
By "stretched his legs", Bloom meant shit LIKE that. When you start looking for shitty writing on that level, it's like five times a page. I see where Bloom's comin from.
>>7816851
Nah. I just read all these recently in a few days. Here's the order.
6>4>1>3>2>5>7
>>7814845
Read this shit when I was young. All I remember was the verbal filler 'er' being used excessively.
>>7816867
You're a pleb if you need to jerk off to your childhood every day to not off yourself.
>>7816044
Wasn't your example what happened to Snape? He wasn't untalented, but still ugly and ostracized.
>>7816115
The Houses work based on what you have the most and what you VALUE the most. Harry could have been in Slytherin because he's cunning and shrewd, but he values courage more. Same with Hermione and Ravenclaw, she does say the hat took a while to decide where to put her.
That being said I agree the greatest downfall of the books' plot is how white and black it all is. For a series that was meant to grow up with the reader, the only maturity comes in the way of "darker" events like torture or death, but there's never anything thought-provoking. How great would it have been in Voldemort's followers actually being good people who think what they're doing is for the best, but the book goes of its way to time and gain prove that what little Death Eater idology exists is baseless, with Voldemort himself being a half-blood, and that the whole thing is just Voldemort fearing death and being evil because >muh no love. Plus every single Death Eater being a murderous torturer (from House Slytherin).
Speaking of, >>7815898 is right in regards to the house system. Rowling clearly ralized she had written herself into a corner with this, alongside many other things, in book 6. That's when suddenly you have good Slytherins like Slughorn, and when also the whole series is retconned into the mcguffin hunt it ends up becoming. But her attempts to make the House system less stupid fall flat. She had so many chances to fix this: simply introduce Slytherins that are cool, ambitious, resourceful and help Harry, introduce Hufflepuffs that are loyal and hard working but towards an "evil" goal (Umbridge would have been great for this), elaborate on Quirrell being a Ravenclaw or have more evil Ravenclaws like him, and show an "evil" Gryffindor whose bravery is done for harmful purposes instead of being a total coward like Wormtail.
She does try to fix this half-heartedly through extended material like Pottermore, in which Slytherin is basically the coolest house, but in the books themselves Gryffindors are heroes, Hufflepuffs are good people (Goblet of Fire is basically a one-book celebration to this), Ravenclaws are smart and Slytherins are evil.
TL;DR: the problem with Harry Potter is that its so-called growth is simply false maturity by means of having "dark" stuff, but no shades of gray to let the reader decide for themselves.
>>7815898
Yeah fewer than a dozen people annually read Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo?
>>7817590
It's been awhile since I read them, but I thought Snape was more
>ooh, I want to hang with this cool gang
>oh, but I want this chick to slitherin my snake
Also, Snape was a dope potions and spell guy. Made a few of his own, I think. It was written in his potions book that Harry finds.
I dig the misguided death eater though.
You know what really bothers me, looking back? Dumbledore
>be 17
>talking to other gay wizard about changing the world and taking command
>badness happens
>leave that trail.
>billionsAndBillions of years later
>Harry Potter
>Welp, might as well use people again, even though my biggest sin earlier was thinking I could control the people.
Seriously; it's revealed that he went from awannabe Hitler world rulerto amanipulative jerk who uses people knowing full well they might die.Doesn't even tell people about it.
>>7817608
But if Dumbly doesn't do that, Voldywag takes over the world. You're complaining about the wrong shit my man.
>>7817608
The more I think about it, the more Dumbledore represents Slytherin's ideals (aligned to "good").
Dumbledore was never courageous or brave. He fucked up as a young man and instead of stopping his gay crush all he did was wait and wait for years while Grindelwald killed tons of people until he was basically forced to fight him. Then, during the whole Voldemort fiasco, Dumbledore always acts manipulative, disregarding everyone's feelings and well-being for his cause. His whole "I'm so randumb xD" facade is shown to be fake in The Prince's Tale, the only time we see how he interacts in an honest way, where he clearly manipulates Snape time and time again very cunningly and without emotion. And then he dies with his plan set in motion (his plan being "get Harry killed at the right moment, I don't care how many people die in the process").
He's never brave, he's just manipulative, in his youth for power and and his later years for good. Greatest Slytherin ever.
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>>7817628
>get Harry killed at the right moment
Who is perpetuating this meme? Dumbledore knew HP couldn't die.
>>7815069
It does with me, but yeah, maybe doesn't happen that frequently irl
>>7817561
You should probably tell mommy that you need a therapist.
>>7815133
Harry Potter will work
>>7815133
This is why I love to re-read the series, but the more I read, the more I detest the language that Rowling uses
>The troll stopped next to a doorway and peered inside. It waggled its long ears, making up its tiny mind, then slouched slowly into the room.
>"The keys in the lock," Harry muttered. "We could lock it in."
>"Good idea," said Ron nervously.
>They edged toward the open door, mouths dry, praying the troll wasn't about to come out of it. With one great leap, Harry managed to grab the key, slam the door, and lock it.
>'Yes!"
It's so fucking bland.
C'mon, lads, it's a fucking children's book. What you all on about?
>>7817651
it should be banned.
it's not literature.
>>7817654
>supports literature
>by destroying literature
>>7817654
Literature is a way of reading, not the qualities that one superimposes onto any given text.
>>7814913
I've discovered it (eurika! Eurika!) The dumbest thing ever written.
>>7817665
>your existence
>living
>>7817671
>posted on 4chan
>>7817633
Bloom is always right
>>7814913
>he didn't read the critical intros in his copies of Homer
you fucked up, and the light of red fingered dawn will illuminate your plebbiness.
Series of Unfortunate Events > other children's books > all YA fiction
Why the fuck didn't you read A Cadmean Victory yet?
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11446957/1/A-Cadmean-Victory
>>7815133
In Search of Lost Time is exactly what you're looking for, friend
>>7817591
I mean, it was an exaggeration but if you're not autistic about numbers then the point still stands - Bloom generally considers "high brow" prestige and literary quality to be entirely overlapping categories, even if he did initially help put some (now important) modernist poets on the critical map, like Stevens
>>7817628
What's the term neutral good or chaotic good?
>>7817659
Thank you for not being a pleb
>>7815043
You're looking at it like an adult
All I know is that I had more fun reading it as a kid than any other series.
> Wheel of Time
> Ctrl+f tugged her braid
> -2135142415 results
Hmmm
>>7814875
It's shit. Stick to the classics, friendo.
>>7817665
How do cliches dull the mind? Why do cliches matter if the audience has never seen them before?
>>7817590
There are shades of grey, and there are things that are complicated, that is the main growth because it starts more black and white.
>>7815898
>>7816044
>>7817590
>>7817608
The Malfoys-- both Draco and Lucius, and maybe Narcissa to a degree -- are what you're looking for. Their story isn't focused on so much, which would've been a great addition, but they all clearly are more and more disillusioned with Riddle and his gang each time we see them from the time he comes back (or in Draco's case, a bit later). That also addresses the lack of complexity in "bad guys".
>>7814913
because she has a word processor with a save function at her disposal.
>>7817650
How could it be better? More descriptive? Longer sentences?
>>7817650
>i, an adult, find this children's novel to be shallow... and pedantic
>>7815898
Come back when you know what the word "reactionary" mean. Hint: it's not a synonym for "contrarian."
