Hummers and Potters
Why is it (she grumped) that one can be standing at the sink washing dishes and look out to see all kinds of hummers being enchanting around the feeder, and occasionally the yellow and black bird stoking up, but as SOON as one races upstairs for the cell phone cam, they all vanish for hours?
Other than that, it's hot, but that's to be expected. At least the punishing sun is on its slide toward darker earlier, thank goodness.
Hither and yon I've seen "Harry Potter twenty years!" posts but I don't really read more than a paragraph. I read and enjoyed each book, skimming larger and larger sections as each book got more bloated; they never quite inspired a second read, though I could see that had I read them as a kid I would have loved them to bits, and I probably would have struggled with magic wand 'logic' over my own magic delivery system, had I read them early enough.
More interesting to me than the books has been their phenomenal influence on the field--finally YA became an accepted subgenre, and is now a market power house. Before Potter, many of us who said we wrote for kids were asked variations on, "And when will you write a real book?" Many of us had already written about magic schools--had read about them. But of course in those days the received wisdom was that no kid would read a book over 60 k words (though we all did), and the kids had to stay emotionally about twelve.
But this series was the one that caught the imagination of a generation.
It's interesting to see the Potter influence in the writers who grew up on the stories. Literature is always in conversation with itself, and tracing influence is fun when you read back far enough. It's especially interesting seeing the mix of film and story with Potter: in the books, Malfoy, for example, is one dimensional, always rotten except for a line or so in a late book, but the films gave him a beautiful face, and as a consequence there are so many angsty-but-beautiful bad boys with pale blond hair in YA stories written by the Potter generation. As I recall, Malfoy didn't have any angst in the books. He was just a snot. But the best of the fanfic writers gave him tons of angst as he pined for Harry, and at last seduced him--and the fanfic has been a strong influence as it developed many of these writers.
I think there is a terrific PhD thesis in this. (If it isn't already being written.)
Other than that, it's hot, but that's to be expected. At least the punishing sun is on its slide toward darker earlier, thank goodness.
Hither and yon I've seen "Harry Potter twenty years!" posts but I don't really read more than a paragraph. I read and enjoyed each book, skimming larger and larger sections as each book got more bloated; they never quite inspired a second read, though I could see that had I read them as a kid I would have loved them to bits, and I probably would have struggled with magic wand 'logic' over my own magic delivery system, had I read them early enough.
More interesting to me than the books has been their phenomenal influence on the field--finally YA became an accepted subgenre, and is now a market power house. Before Potter, many of us who said we wrote for kids were asked variations on, "And when will you write a real book?" Many of us had already written about magic schools--had read about them. But of course in those days the received wisdom was that no kid would read a book over 60 k words (though we all did), and the kids had to stay emotionally about twelve.
But this series was the one that caught the imagination of a generation.
It's interesting to see the Potter influence in the writers who grew up on the stories. Literature is always in conversation with itself, and tracing influence is fun when you read back far enough. It's especially interesting seeing the mix of film and story with Potter: in the books, Malfoy, for example, is one dimensional, always rotten except for a line or so in a late book, but the films gave him a beautiful face, and as a consequence there are so many angsty-but-beautiful bad boys with pale blond hair in YA stories written by the Potter generation. As I recall, Malfoy didn't have any angst in the books. He was just a snot. But the best of the fanfic writers gave him tons of angst as he pined for Harry, and at last seduced him--and the fanfic has been a strong influence as it developed many of these writers.
I think there is a terrific PhD thesis in this. (If it isn't already being written.)