Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
Okay, I’m clueless. Again.
The Museum of Science and Industry, that really cool place on Chicago’s South Side with the submarine and coal mine, has a Harry Potter Exhibit. Read about it here.
Other than purely mercenary motives, what are they thinking? Science? Industry? I don’t get it.
Must be proximity to the ‘School Experience Most Like Hogwarts.’
Your thoughts?
Bloomsbury faces Harry Potter copyright claim 15.06.09
Bloomsbury Publishing is being sued by the estate of children’s writer Adrian Jacobs over claims that J K Rowling “copied” his work in one of her Harry Potter books. The estate is also seeking a court order against Rowling for “pre-action disclosure” in order to determine whether to include her as a defendant. [Read more…]
One complaint I have heard about Hogwarts Professor is that I don’t post many items that are critical of Ms. Rowling’s writing. I think that’s fair criticism. My job for the last seven years has been to explain to folks who believe the writing is trash and the books “slop” how the books succeed, which is to say, how Ms. Rowling’s artistry and meaning are responsible for Potter Mania.
I find conversations like this one at The Hog’s Head about the lack of grieving time for Harry, in which readers discuss how this isn’t that much of a problem, more interesting than ones where folks look down their noses at “obvious failings” in plot and characterization.
But there are some problems worth discussing. And we should talk about them here. Because I’m not very good at this, though, I will hand the blog reins today to two Potter Experts from the Debt Coast, Wendy and the Red Hen. Their subject: the critical and failed plot points of Regulus Black’s sacrificial death and the Locket Horcrux. [Read more…]
Please be patient with us as we change servers. All HogPro content will be back by later today!
A review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians: A Portrait of the Artist as a Recovering Narniac:
Serious Readers of Harry Potter need to read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Grossman’s Magicians, in brief, is what the Potter Saga might have been if Rowling had let her Nabakov fancy collide and collude with her Narnian imagination.
Is the collision of the modern novel and high fantasy in The Magicians a pretty thing? Not always. In fact, frequently it’s jarring, even disturbing. But both the engagement in another world (as well as a world within our world — The Magicians embraces Hogwarts and Narnia) and the shock of realism in this setting and from the too real failings of adult postmoderns are fluidly combined in Grossman’s third novel.
I cannot say you’ll enjoy all or even most of the book if you love Harry Potter; but your appreciation and understanding of the postmodern fantasy novel, of which Rowling’s work is one example and only the most successful, will be extended remarkably by your time at Brakebills and in Fillory. The Magicians is largely about the experience of reading fantasy, and its rewards and dangers for self-understanding and relationship to the world. Grossman offers front and back, highs and lows, and serious readers will recognize their reflection as well as the shades of Lewis, Rowling, and White, not to mention Salinger, Roth, and Pynchon. [Read more…]
Recent Conversation