Hog Pro Notes

It’s a throw-away line at the very end of a long Daily Show with Jon Stewart piece about Congressmen “playing the race card,” but the line “Nice work, Dumbledore!” gets a very big laugh. Which represents, of course, the degree to which this fictional character’s appearance has become part of the shared public imagination.

Any other recent sightings? Or is that “citings”?

We focus on Harry Potter here and have a good deal of enthusiastic discussion about Twilight and the Hunger Games books (10 more days to Mockingjay!) but there are a lot of other books out there we neglect by necessity in saying as much as we do about these series. To help correct that imbalance, long time HogPro All-Pro Deborah Chan, aka Arabella Figg, a writer living in eastern Washington State, offers her recommendations in a guest post titled ‘Young Adult Books Offer Great Reading.’ Enjoy!

Every time I go into bookstores or the library these days, I get discouraged by the adult selections. I’m an eclectic reader, so I can’t just head over to a particular genre section and find a treasure trove. Instead, I circle around the new and general/genre book section, picking up, putting down…and often leave empty-handed and discouraged, wondering if there will ever be anything good to read again.

Adult fiction has been overtaken by what I call The Jodi Picoult Syndrome (Picoult writes bestsellers—I’ve read two—that are literary, compelling, and… vastly depressing). This Syndrome means that a novel will plunge me into a gloomy, psychological story, full of angst, dysfunction, family secrets, rocky and wrecked marriages, creepy people, disturbed or damaged children, tragedy, forbidden love, and an ending that can’t possibly have an edifying or uplifting resolution, given the whopping freight of human misery leading up to it. Last fall I tried to read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge for a book club and the unpleasant narrator drove me away by page three. Read the rest of this entry »

Story here with more Emma pics!

I was just finishing up my essay on the choice of 1692 for the date of the International Statue on Wizarding Secrecy, when my wife received this post on her FaceBook page from HogPro All-Pro, Jerry Bowyer:

“Hey, Mary, has John ever noticed the parallel between Arthur Weasley in HP and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, the British PM?”

The answer to his question is “No, I hadn’t” but it is a great catch and I blush that I hadn’t made this connection. I think it’s a match for three reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

S. M. Hutchens of Touchstone magazine has written a rejoinder in ‘Harry Potter Coda‘ to Michael O’Brien’s assertions that Harry Potter is not good reading, ‘good’ in the sense of its being well written or of its being spiritually edifying.  Mr. Hutchens is not a Harry Hallower by any means; he believes the books are dangerous and encourage unfortunate beliefs and behaviors. He insists, though that Harry’s adventures in the end reflect “the Story Upon Which All Stories Worth Hearing are based” and will foster the imagination and heart of those who do and those who do not yet know this Story.

Mr. Hutchens and I are not on the same page about such story points as the mandrakes and the Dumbledore-Snape “suicide pact.” I do think, however, that his thoughtful comments, with all its concessions to Mr. O’Brien, will be a much more effective invitation to the Harry Wary among Catholics and conservative Christians to read the books than my own efforts. And that is cause for celebration. (H/T to Perelandra!)

Elliot Nelson writes at Unless a Seed Dies: An Exploration of Christianity and he has been exploring at length there the Christian themes of Harry Potter. For those of you who find this subject as interesting as I do, there is a list of twenty five subjects with links to Mr. Nelson’s essays on those topics after the jump. Please share your thoughts and recommendations! Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Potter turns 30 tomorrow (and Ms. Rowling 45) and I wanted to ask you what you thought Harry’s best birthday was? I assume the great majority of readers and movie-goers will vote for his eleventh birthday because of the revelations in the House on the Rock and his day with Hagrid. That certainly makes sense because that b-day in many ways marks his re-birth and discovery of self.

But there are other birthdays in the book that are eventful and meaningful, even revealing of the story-ending because Ms. Rowling liked to point to the finale at the story-start and as often as not started with Harry’s birthday. Dobby, for example, appears on Harry’s LaborDay version of a birthday in Chamber and that book ends with Dobby’s re-birth and liberation.

What is your favorite Harry birthday, then, and please do share what plans you have to commemorate the natal anniversary of The Boy Who Lived!

Last week in Key West, folks celebrated what would have been Ernest Hemingway’s 110^th birthday with their annual Hemingway Days, a week-long celebration of all things Hemingway, including a look-alike contest, writing competition, and, my personal favorite, the running of the Hemingways, sort of like the  running of the bulls in Pamplona, only with all the Hemingway wannbes instead of bovines. Considering the heat in Florida in July and the fact that most folks go in for the later-in-life Hemingway look, it might actually be more dangerous than the bull running. I hope EMTs were on hand.

What does this spectacle have to do with our discussions here? Well, after enjoying watching all the great character impersonators at Infinitus (I don’t go in for that myself, but I really enjoy observing. I should just wear a sign that says, “Nope, these are just my regular clothes”), I noticed a few interesting trends. While some characters have many folks who want to adopt their look, others seemed absent; completely missing, unless I missed her, was anyone dressed up as Rowling herself. Which leads me to wonder how we will honor her in future years. Will people want to have Rowling make-overs? Is there a big future in Rowling impersonators, or will we be content to mug as the characters she has created? Read the rest of this entry »

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf answers a young person’s question about whether reading Harry Potter constitutes a sin that needs to be confessed. “Fr. Z’s” answer is a wishy-washy “no;” his dismissal of Potter as second rate reading and his defensive sop to his blog audience that he didn’t buy the books he read suggests even the overly-couched thumbs up for Harry comes at a price. Sure enough, the Harry Haters are on him in a minute and Catholic Potter-Philes are there soon after exchanging urls and sureties of just how wrong the other side is. Read the rest of this entry »