I’m in the midst of a binge-read of Louise Penny novels and I confess to feeling more than a little tempted, after reading Nick Jeffery’s posts yesterday and the day before, to put aside aside Gamache 4, A Rule Against Murder, in order to read the twelve Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons titles.

I found he film trailer above and suspected that, as with the several chase scenes in the most recent adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this movie was more a Blockbuster Retelling of a beloved story within Hollywood set parameters. And it seems to be, sort of.

But not really! I read a Daily Telegraph review of the film by Lewis Jones, ‘From MI6 to tea with Trotsky: the secret life of Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome,’ in which I learned to my delight that the biggest change to the story-line was based on the author’s own remarkable life. Ransome, it turns out, had lived in Russia during its agonizing transition to the Soviet Union, 1914-1924, and worked simultaneously as a correspondent for English newspapers and propagandist for the Bolsheviks. He was recruited by M16 on his return to England but was always thought of as something of a Soviet sympathizer, if not quite a double-agent.

The movie-makers, in a film largely set on a lake, chose to incorporate these facts from Ransome’s ‘Lake’ as Rowling understands it, and re-worked them in their dark-room ‘Shed’ to raise the movie-version’s stakes significantly. Nick Jeffery’s points in ‘Biography Illuminating Text‘ seem to be at least as true about the movie as the books. [Read more…]

In 2016 I received an email from Brian Basore in which he shared his thoughts about Lewis Carroll, a remarkably complex man with an outsized set of contradictions in his life even for the Victorian era. Brian subsequently became a regular correspondent and a valued part of the HogwartsProfessor online community. I don’t know how many years it was before I learned that he lived in my adopted hometown, Oklahoma City, and before we met at a Christmas party in my home.

He recently retired from his job at the Oklahoma Historical Society, a job which he largely invented day to day along with what ‘Oklahoma History’ is (his 45 years there represent just under 40% of the state’s existence and close to 100% I think of what could be called its adulthood). Brian’s co-workers, his friends and admirers, had a small going away party in his honor on his last day.

It had a Harry Potter theme.

When he wrote to me about it, I thought this was an opportunity to challenge one of the persistent myths about Rowling Readers, namely, that they are all younger people, predominantly women, politically progressive, read mostly on their smart phones or iPads, and live on the American coasts. Kat Miller of MuggleNet recently opined to Variety that Harry Potter fandom was mostly women and “very, very queer.” That may seem to be more evidence of the bubble world in which she lives than reality, but my experience of fandom gatherings from 2003 to 2020 is that this is a fair description of that demographic.

But does that part of fandom which lives on Twixter and social media and which plans its vacations around Fan Con meet-ups in Orlando reflect the international diversity of Rowling’s audience? Or is it really just a reflection of the reality that readers of fiction are overwelmingly women?

Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.

One thing is certain: Americans—of either gender—are reading fewer books today than in the past. A poll released last month by The Associated Press and Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that the typical American read only four books last year, and one in four adults read no books at all. This ‘Why Women Read More than Men‘ NPR story is from the year Deathly Hallows was published, but its assertions seem current: [Read more…]