Readers and film goers come to HogwartsProfessor.com for challenging discussion of popular literature and especially the novels of J. K. Rowling. There are Harry Potter fan sites which are much more popular than this one, but there are none that I know of that take Rowling and her work as seriously as we do or offer the insights about the artistry and meaning in play in the novels, screenplays, even the longer Twitter sequences she writes.
We may also be the only website that offers extensive, in depth, and fun commentary on and speculation about Rowling’s Cormoran Strike mysteries. There’s so much good material in our archives, in fact, on each of the four books we have from Robert Galbraith that the Serious Striker needs a guide or catalog for easy reference.
Hence the Pillar Post project. If you look on the left sidebar of the HogwartsProfessor homepage, you’ll see a list there of subject categories beneath which links are hiding a panoply of posts within that category. All the Strike novels’ Pillar Post listings, for example, are to be found by clicking on INDIVIDUAL ROWLING WORKS, posts about literary alchemy and ring composition are under KEYS FOR INTERPRETATION, and Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent discussion in AUTHORS NOT J.K. ROWLING.
I’ve really only just started this cataloging work; forgive me if the Pillar Post you want or need isn’t done yet. The ‘Literary Alchemy’ pillar only has urls sorted into categories, but The Hunger Games collection is done (just in time for discussion about the prequel) and, as of late last night, the Lethal White set is finished as well. (I shouldn’t say the Pillar Posts are “done” or “finished” because they will need to be updated, but the first gathering and cataloging is ‘up.’)
If I say so myself, the Lethal White Pillar Post is the equivalent of a very, very good published guidebook to the fourth Cormoran Strike novel. There are more than eighty entries that cover subjects as varied as the Cratylic names, literary alchemy and mythic context, and the novel’s ring composition, not to mention discussion of the science in the book, the historical Rattenbury for whom the mad terrier is named (Peeves!), and the literary allusions and influences (Rosmersholm!).
It has writing from Louise Freeman, Beatrice Groves, Joanne Gray, M. Evan Willis, Elizabeth Baird-Hardy, and others as well as myself, and frankly, it doesn’t get better than that crowd of Serious Strikers.
Did I mention the echoes of Goblet of Fire and Cuckoo’s Calling in Lethal White? All the links to those posts are in one spot on this page, too.
Check it out if you have a moment — and, if you have two moments, let me know what you think by writing a note in the comment box below! Let me know, too, if you’d like to volunteer to help gather together the urls for one of these Pillar Posts yourself; I could sure use a hand in completing this project.
Speak Your Mind