/lit/ - Literature

>>15062636
Tom Swift with magic

>>15062636
my opinion of harry potter has been tainted by the hordes of plebs giving it unwarranted praise

>>15062636
Decent children's book, since it has an interesting world-building it will make kids read it. Once you're over 18, you should stop talking about this book and read better literature. If you're talking about a serious analysis of the book: shit prose, poorly written dialogues, repetitive, clearly ghost-written from the fourth book and overall a mediocre piece of "serious" literature. Then again, it's a children's book, so why put it up to a high standard?

>>15062887
>prose, poorly written dialogues, repetitive, clearly ghost-written

What exactly are these elements of the books? What are notable examples of these instances?

>>15063254
Harry "stretches his legs" every two pages, the dialogue is unimaginative, and so on. I think a lot of this (especially the accusation of ghostwritten, which I personally don't believe) is that the first three books made so much money that the editors let Jo do whatever the fuck she wanted starting from the fourth one, which is how you got the 700+ page clusterfuck of Order of the Phoenix. The prose in 1 and 2 are miles ahead of the stuff in later books.

>>15062636
This guy deserves to be beaten within an inch of his life.

Someone post the /tv/ pasta

>>15062636

>>15062636
HPMOR > vanilla Harry Potter

>>15064613
>Methods of Tipping your Fedora in the Presence of Women

It got Harold Bloom to publish a collection of texts intended as remedial reading for children. That's about the only good thing I have to say.

Good books, would read again.

>>15062636
Harry Potter is just entertaining literature for kids. If you look at it like that, there is nothing wrong with it. It is entertaining and has some memorable characters (Luna).

The problem is that part of the fanbase thinks it is more than that. They think it is some kind of Anna Karenina-like book with important life lessons.

>>15062636
Entertaining series, but not a classic.

It will be read for the next 30 years, then forgotten.

>>15062887
Because not all children's books are so lazily written and not all writers for children are bad. Lewis Carroll wrote for children, too. As did Hans-Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle.

There are good writers for young people, the appeal of whose work lessens with age.

Why have children read Rowling's dreck instead? Are they not thereby condemned to a life of poor reading choices?

>>15064676
Rowling did get an education in the classics so there were sort of archetypal moral lessons - nothing profound by any stretch. In fact, the whole book is seeded with archetypes to the point of cliche'. One thing I she did well, and this was probably due to her being a woman, was to emphasize character relationships and their responsibility for accomplishing major plot objects, that really makes the book a whole lot better than some dry mythological sausage fest of the triumph of good over evil in the wizarding world.

>>15064048
Order is the best one and absolute kino. She fell off the rails in 6 for political reasons.

>>15065647
Chamber of Secrets is GOAT

>>15065654
Purely contrarian opinion here. But Gilderoy is hilarious.

>>15064562
Haha choking on cereal guy! Classic reddit!

>>15062636
They were good. I enjoyed them. The last one came out 13 years ago. I've moved on. They don't warrant anywhere near that level of consideration.

>>15062887
Basically this.

If you try to reread any of them post-adolescence, you will be disappointed. JK couldn't write her way out of a paper bag.

>>15065745
I feel like that's more "Branagh is hilarious"

>>15062636
They're not terrible. Quite fun, actually, as long as you're not reading much into it. I might watch the films once in a while, be entertained, but that's about it. And I really like Sirius Black.

No one dare post the copy paste....

>>15064780
Even if those writers dampen with age, I would still say an adult can appreciate what their work does well. Harry Potter really has nothing to appreciate about it once you grow up.

>>15062636
another subhuman onions.

>>15062887
HP has its strengths: wish fulfillment, characterization, just enough plot and worldbuilding, themes like bullying, racism, coming of age, etc. however, the books are ultimately shallow. I wouldn't call them shitty or ghostwritten, but they're not serious literature. they're perfectly fine for a 12 year old to dive into, but it doesn't ascend any higher than that.

>>15064647
this. methods of rationality is absolutely fedora. it's flat out incompetent as literature, and exists as a monument to the authors ego. on that note, Cursed Child is pure fanfiction.

>>15064780
Chronicles of Narnia are the best children's lit I've read, imo.

>>15066690
Yet, 13 years later, why do so many Millennials talk about it a lot? It still gets seen a lot on social media like Twitter and Instagram. The Generation Z people don't seem as interested in it, though. Like OP said, it's an older sibling or parent thing now.

>>15068541
Yet, 13 years later, why do so many Millennials talk about it a lot?
marketing and onions

>>15068541
Millenials, like Baby Boomers, were a mistake.

>>15064663
Which texts are those? Thanks!

>>15062636
Lord Voldemort is a particularly evil villian I think. The resurrection scene in Goblet of Fire is downright satanic.

>>15062887
>it will make kids read it
It was a product of its time, and kids of that time read it. Kids don't read it now.

>>15068541

That's purely nostalgia. A lot of people remember them as some of the first books they've ever read, and so they look at them with rose-tinted glasses.

Don't get me wrong, they're entertaining reads for the fantastic world they introduce, but there's not much substance. People just remember their conversations with other people about them from way back and when any news gets posted about the Harry Potter universe then they get back together and reminisce.

>>15069408
I think Voldemort is one of the worst aspects of the saga. He felt really underwelming for me. I liked a few things about him, like the Tom Riddle story in Chamber of Secrets and his resurrection in Goblet of Fire, but he was mostly an uninteresting villain to me. I never felt like Voldemort was some sort of unstoppable force, an overpowered bad guy, a genuinely terrifying presence or anything. He never had this edge of danger that makes you think "OH FUCK, OH FUCK, OH FUCK!"

>>15068541
It's the only books the people who talk about it have read. Well, really started. They read the first one or two and then just watched the movies. Why are they popular? I don't know. Why is the Masked Singer popular?

>>15069465
Well I have not read any of the books since Deathly Hallows was released, but that's exactly how I remember Lord Voldemort. The MF was skilled at using the killing curse, the torture curse and the manipulation curse and had zero empathy or remorse and would use those curses to his own ends with no hesitation. Pretty good reason to be scared of the guy. Not to mention the whole dynamic of how he was destined to be as such because of how he was conceived and his resulting lack of any sense of attachment or love is pretty cool; and so his fear of death and ironic eternal punishment of being incomplete and broken in limbo.

>>15069417
Maybe that is really what is going on, that kids are no longer really reading the books, or even watching the movies as much as their older relatives. It's interesting how Harry Potter seems to firmly be a young adult to middle aged thing, now, without many teenagers on about it as, for example, five to ten years ago.

>>15062636
Why do guys like this have such cold, empty eyes? Are they born this way - is it like a specific neurotype or phenotype - or is it more a result of their soulless mindset?

>>15070339
I think it is more of a learned behavior for most people that act like that about aspects of popular culture, such as this book series. It is so sensation-driven, and probably real for some, but the expression and admiration for the books are probably more exaggerated than realistic, taking on a parody-looking appearance of what happiness is supposed to look like. It is a rather dim-Witted look.

The real 00s-teens blackpill was always Philip Reeve and the Mortal Engines quadrilogy

For lighter fantasy though I'd say Diana Wynne Jones was the best, she was writing at exactly the right time culturally to bridge the gap between Tolkien's era of fantasy and the 'new' era od science fiction. She truly understood the genre more than any YA author of the last 20 years. RIP.

>>15062718
/thread

>>15062636
quite horrible of you to bring this up, my good friend was killed over such a discussion
suffice to say, the dust has not settled

na nana na nan naaaa naaaaa naaaa nan naaa naaaaaaaaa nan naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

>>15062636
stolen from The Books of Magic

Hate to say it but I probably wouldn't be as much of a reader if I didn't read them as a kid

If you didn't read them before you were 10, you can basically ignore them.
Maybe read them to your kids when they are 5 or so, before they can read it themselves.

>>15064048
Bloom was pulling that out of his ass. The expression "stretches his legs" doesn't appear at all in the first book (and probably barely anywhere else in the series). And how many modern kid's books have "imaginative dialogue"?

>>15062636
Popularity is way down. A decade ago, I had a children's lit class of 70, and ONE student hadn't already read the first HP book. Nowadays, only a handful of my students have. The books were written for one cohort of readers, slowly going up in complexity and aging with the characters and readers into YA. That made them incredibly popular as they came out, but it's a major liability now: the first three books are fine for young readers, but the last four are too much of a slog (and the opposite is true: a tween that might love book 5 is going to be insulted by book 1). They're an awkward fit for any reading age, taken as a complete series to be read all in a row.

>>15072750
What are the general trends that you've noticed in relation to the literacy of your students, anon? Do you teach older kids? Are any of them too redpillded for the corporate YA sludge that the culture industry ceaselessly spews out?

I only read about half way through the first one and thought it was a book for retards so I stopped

>>15072791
Most of my students are 1st-2nd year university, so many of them are in transition from YA and school reading to more complex texts. I force them to read a dozen older classics before Harry Potter, so even if they've read it before, they see it in a different light by then. I haven't seen any dip in literacy, but the ability to handle longer books and keep up with readings does seem to have declined slightly. The crucial difference is just enrollment: most of the universities I know have less than half of the entering students declaring English as their major that we did a decade ago, which has destroyed departmental funding. The academic humanities are in a massive slump.