The hype over the Harry Potter books
Saturday, July 21, 2007
I just don't get it.
I tried a few times to get into the first book, but children's fiction just doesn't do it for me; I found it unbearably dull. Am I the only one? It sure seems like it.
Posted byMJ at 8:01 AM
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I love, love, love children's fiction, but I never could get into Harry Potter books. There are vampires, unicorns, centaurs and dragons in the first one. Being the anal literary geek that I am, I objected too much to including all those creatures that come from completely different cultural backgrounds/mythologies. But I love the movies!
I too started the first book several times over quite a stretch of time and repeatedly found myself not getting through more than a chapter or so and then giving it away. I have a much younger nephew who devoured each book as it was released and I think this kind of made me more curious than the overall media/publisher hype. I watched the movies and after the most recent one (Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix) I went back to the very first book and gave it another go. I think it helped that I now already had an idea of and a feel for the characters through the movies (although there are many, many differences between the two which in some cases bugged me no end - starting from the colour of Hagrid's umbrella - black in the films but pink in the books) and I not only finished the book in record time then but was eager enough to grab the next one when I finished the first. I ended up getting through all of the ones we had, just in time for the final book to be released. Think I was half way through the second last book when the final one came out.
There are moments of sheer brilliance in the story and lots of laughs. I'm not sure whether I like the movies or the books better. Often I prefer the books to the movies with this kind of thing but in this case if it weren't for the films, I suspect I would never have appreciated the books and they are different enough to the movies and enjoyable in their own right. There was a large section in the middle of the final book that I thought was quite boring and pointless but overall I liked the series very much.
Hagrid, Hermione, Ron and Snape where the characters that made it for me. Especially the two whose names end with an 'e'. Well, I guess Harry was alright too... lol