Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
According to a new NEA study, we all are and it’s due to a rise in how much fiction we all read.
I know I’m reading a lot more fiction today than I was ten years ago and that this change is largely due to our favorite boy wizard and the Hogwarts adventures. Is this true of you, too? How has your reading changed, both in terms of what you are reading and how you read it?
Well, I have a friend there! Patricio Tarantino, the webmaster at RedFlu ~ Noticias de Harry Potter, has written me a few times and yesterday posted a review of Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader at his beautiful and popular site. (Mr. Tarantino’s English is very good but the book review is in Spanish.) For all of you polygluts, please visit the site and let me know what you think.
One of the joys of being a Potter Pundit is correspondence I enjoy with serious readers around the world (hi, Odd!). ‘Tinuvielas’ is a German writer who has written here several times and to me personally about literary alchemy and I have always been enriched, not to say ‘stretched,’ by what I have learned in those notes. I hope very much, for instance, that you will someday be able to read Tiunvielas’ thoughts on the alchemy in Shelley’s Frankenstein which promises to be great work.
Anyway, Tinuvielas posted notes this morning on HogPro alchemy threads and I worry that many readers who don’t scan the “comments” column daily will miss the insights therein. Hence this compilation post. I look forward to reading your comments about and corrections to these thoughts: [Read more…]
I turned in drafts for four chapters of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf yesterday, and, while waiting for guidance about what to do next, I read Twilight, the first of Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swann novels. Here are 10 thoughts from my first pass through it: [Read more…]
This is the continuation and significant expansion of a previous post on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and its possible influence on Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which post can be read here.
After a hurried re-reading of Garden, here are my first thoughts. I think we can see significant correspondences between as well as a chasm separating Burnett’s classic about rejuvenation in an English Garden and the Hogwarts adventures. I will (1) list the match-ups here, (2) take a stab at interpreting Garden at the allegorical level beyond noting the Theosophical Society, Spiritualism, and Christian Science references, and (3) try to explain what strike me as the most important similarity and difference between the postmodern series and the late Victorian novel vis a vis their intention and execution. I was surprised at the paucity of thoughtful commentary about Garden that I could find online, in itself and in connection with Harry Potter; I trust any of you that are more familiar with the children’s literature field will jump in with more informed reflections on these subjects than I can offer here on the fly. [Read more…]
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