Laurie Halse Anderson Wins Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award

March 8, 2023 by Leave a Comment

I have written and presented lots about psychology within the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series, both at fan events and scholarly conferences.  However, neither J.K. Rowling or Robert Galbraith ever turned up in the audience to hear my talk. However, in 2018, at the UNLV Summit on Young Adult Literature, I was privileged to give a talk on PTSD in Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and in the works of Laurie Halse Anderson, one of the conference keynote authors. I was both honored and frankly terrified to see Ms. Anderson herself turn up as part of the relatively small audience for my talk, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of my professional life. Ms. Anderson was very gracious and appreciative of what I said, and quite supportive of the work I was doing on YAL and empathy.

Ms. Anderson has just been awarded one of the top prizes in children’s literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.  I am very excited to see this news and offer my heartiest congratulations.  If any Hogpro readers would like to start a discussion of Speak, Wintergirls or The Impossible Knife of Memory, please chime it!

Filed Under: Louise Freeman

The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac

March 7, 2023 by 2 Comments

Bloomsbury announced late last week that they will be publishing a book this October, The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac. For all the details from that announcement, your one-stop resource is TheRowlingLibrary.com; follow that link to TRL’s summary of what to expect in the book, an article I’m told more than 200,000 Potter fans have read. (Patricio Tarantino has already written up his thoughts on the Almanac which will be in this month’s TRL e-zine.)

If any doubters remain who are skeptical about the vitality of Harry Potter fandom, not the official Woke crowd but the gazillion readers who love the story, doubters who think that Rowling has in any way been cancelled, or who do not believe that the Hogwarts Saga remains the Shared Text of the new Millenium, the excitement (and sales) of Hogwarts Legacy and the Wizarding Almanac, not to mention ‘The Witch Hunt of J. K. Rowling’ podcast’s popularity, should help them see the light.

While the new book, available for pre-order, is only #337 this morning on Amazon’s best-seller list and #13 on the sub-category of ‘Children’s Fantasy,’ the #2, 9, and 12 slots on that list are filled by Harry Potter titles, #2 being the seven book series set in print now for fifteen years. Two of the top three titles on the Amazon Children’s ebook list are Potter books and all seven are in the top 25. A guide to Hogwarts Legacy is #39 on the current bestselling book list, the only gaming book there, of course.

I’m not excited about the Almanac, frankly, which promises to be a very beautiful book and an excellent Christmas present for Harry Potter fans. From what I have been read and been told, though, there is nothing new in it from the Rowling Vault miles beneath Gringotts and I doubt very much that its seven chapters, fan-service repackaging of canon material, however exciting the pictorial re-presentation of that information will be, will be anything to be shared with my grandchildren in our read-aloud time. I may buy a copy to review here if no one else does.

That being said, I am delighted by the show of enthusiasm for a new Bloomsbury Potter tome. Fantastic Beasts has been something of a bust relative to the original series, but reader engagement and interest in the Hogwarts Saga continues and seems to be making the essential jump for a classic text as Generation Hex grows up and shares it with their children. Three cheers for that and for the new and vibrant empirical evidence that the Rainbow Reich’s crusade to burn Rowling and her books at the stake has failed.

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Strike Series Rankings: The Final Tally

March 6, 2023 by

Kurt Schreyer posted a challenge to his Cormoran Strike loving followers on social media to rank the six mysteries from most favorite to least favorite. You can read his summary of the challenge responses he received from his dinner guests and twitter audience as well as his own ranking of the six Strike novels here.

Seven of us who write at HogwartsProfessor responded to this idea with posts that included both rankings and our reasoning and criteria for preferring certain books to others. I started the task here and was followed by Beatrice Groves, Nick Jeffery, Louise Freeman, Chris Calderon, Evan Willis, and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy.

Join me after the jump for a tabulation of our rankings here, a comparison with the first twitter responses, and a few ideas about the various approaches Serious Strikers have taken to rank the series entries thus far with an eye to their merits and demerits. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Hog Pro Notes

Elizabeth Baird-Hardy’s Strike Favorites

March 5, 2023 by 4 Comments

In the interest of being as un-influenced as possible, I have collected my list of Strike novels, ranked from least favorite to favorite, without looking at anyone else’s list. I look forward to seeing how my fellow professors here at HogPro list the books, as I have been scrupulously careful to avoid seeing them yet. As with any list, there is always room for debate. While I always enjoy those countdown lists on the radio, usually around New Year’s, I often find myself shouting at some faceless host who has the gall to rank one of my favorite songs outside the top ten on the list of “Greatest 80s Songs,” so I understand the complexities of lists and personal opinions.

In ranking the adventures of our favorite Denmark Street detectives, I am considering my own tastes and interests, of course, as well as what seem to be more empirical standards. It is worth noting that I do not consider an error (like some we have noticed and discussed here over the years, unsurprising considering the amount of text covered by these books) to be an automatic reason to devalue a book or move it down the list. I find that all the novels are worthwhile, so even my Number 6 is not a bad book; I just like the others better, and there is something I like very much in each book, just as there are aspects I don’t like as much. While my number 1 book has not changed since its publication and is likely to remain my favorite in perpetuity, I have found some of the others shifting position on my list, and they may continue to move about with time. I do look forward to discussing all of our lists to see where we differ and concur. Since  I have not read anyone else’s lists, mine may be more or less detailed. So join me after the jump for my humble (and spoiler-laden)contribution to the Strike Ranking Extravaganza! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Elizabeth Baird Hardy

Evan Willis- Strike Series Ranking

March 4, 2023 by 3 Comments

Continuing our series of Hogwarts Professor staff posts ranking the Strike books, I’ll be adding my thoughts to the mix. (After which, I will be interestedly reading through everybody else’s posts, eager to hear what they thought and how they evaluated the texts!)

My method here will be informed by my general tendencies when reading. I struggle with texts if they are considered by themselves alone, independent of other texts. The more I can practice what Mortimer Adler called Syntopical reading, reading texts together in each other’s light, the better I will enjoy and gain from any given book. I will, therefore, tend to rank texts higher when they play a pivotal role narratively in a series, or when the motifs or structure of a text is well illumined by or illuminating of other texts, or most generally when they reward Syntopical reading. The degree to which a book is fundamentally about how one reads, as in the common text-within-a-text of Rowling’s writing, also act favorably in my evaluation. This is not the only standard applied, of course, but in evaluating these books this aspect came up most frequently. In no small part, what follows is just the degree of enjoyment I had while reading each of them, such that the justifications below might not be as airtight as they could be. Ranking follows after the jump, starting from last place and continuing to first.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Evan Willis, Uncategorized