Part 5 in the series on the remarkable similarities in how both Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have been reviewed will be posted Monday, if I finish the bibliography for and corrections to the final manuscript of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures for Penguin/Berkley this weekend. Wish me luck.

If you’re a Potter fan and are only just now discovering the Twilight books and Forks Fandom, I recommend that you check out the Potter parallel universe online with Bella, Edward, and Jacob standing in for Harry, Hermione, and Ron. Twilight Topsites is a good place to start! Of course there’s a Lexicon there…

For Part 1 of this post, click here. for Part 2, click here, or just scroll down on the home page.

I went to the library tonight to pick up Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on CD (I am driving to Connecticut tomorrow for a Zossima Press lunch and to sit in on a class at Yale; they’re reading Goblet and discussing Christology so I thought I’d listen to Jim Dale telling the TriWizard Tournament story on the long drive up 287N). Our local library has a wonderful woman at the helm and she teased me because it took me so long to find the Potter CDs. “Your children would have been able to find them right away.” Because she knows what I write and talk about, she asked me why I needed the audio versions of Goblet and what I was thinking about these days.

I took a deep breath and said I was reading Twilight. After reading this afternoon one self-anointed Potter maven’s disdain for my suggestions here that there is something more than Harlequin Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s books, I half expected her to laugh or do the eyeball-rolling headshake dance. Instead she asked what I thought of them, obviously very interested, and, when I expressed my doubts that teenage girls were the niche audience propelling these books to sales approaching 20 million, she laughed. She admitted that her experience was only anecdotal, but that what she had noticed was readers of every age, male and female, asking for, borrowing, and reading the library’s copies or their own in the library. Other than Harry Potter, she’s never seen anything like that.

I share this conversation for you to make of it what you will. It doesn’t demonstrate anything conclusive, of course, but it makes me think I’m not silly for thinking I’ve seen this situation before (“deja vu all over again”). The desire to bottle and stopper the Twilight Saga phenomenon as a tweenie fad is similar to the insistence in media and reviews for several years that Ms. Rowling’s novels were “just for children” and their success was due to kids loving Goosebump like stories, their susceptibility to clever marketing, and the madness of crowds. Potter mania couldn’t be about the stories being masterfully written and having transcendent meaning. [Read more…]

Lindsey Morgan, a student in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, sent me the following thoughts about Dumbledore’s homosexuality and love in light of Plato’s Symposium. I asked for and received permission to share them with you; please be generous with your comments and criticism! [Read more…]

I will be speaking at Augustana College in April this year and Travis Prinzi will be there as well via interactive electronic media as part of the discussion on that campus about diversity, tolerance, and postmodern morality in general. Richard Priggie, the Augustana professor offering a course on ‘The Postmodern World of Harry Potter,’ has asked Mr. Prinzi and me to help expand the list of controversial topics his students can explore in their term papers. Both of us agreed to post his list and ask readers here and at The Hog’s Head to volunteer their own ideas; Mr. Prinzi, as usual, beat me to this task and did a better job than I would have. Please read the parameters for these thesis paper subjects — one of which is that it has to be a subject discussed at our sister sites! — at the Hog’s Head post and be sure to check out the great subjects already suggested in the comment boxes there.

I’d only note here what is obvious in reading the topics these students will be discussing, namely, that the shared text of the Hogwarts adventures provide a singular and elevated starting place for conversations about literature, morality, and spirituality. We can only hope in the years to come that more professors like Richard Priggie will be using their students’ familiarity with and appreciation of these novels to go “further up and further in.”