Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiderMatt
Reading Harry Potter is popular. I'm skeptical about its long-term carryover effect for other literature. As someone who has loved books his entire life, I found it pretty irksome when the Pottermania hit and I had to suddenly defend my literary tastes against those who viewed Harry Potter as the pinnacle of literary achievement (an old argument with a friend from school comes to mind: he tried to argue that HP was better than Tolkien's LOTR; the heated emotion and sense of blasphemy that I felt is hard to explain). Only after I read the first four books of HP (which is how many there were at the time) did I understand why it was a popular series. It is a good series, but not great. I can't help but feel that if these people read more, they would understand that.
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It's a matter of perspective.
I used to run into folks who thought Piers Anthony was the greatest writer in the world, based on the Xanth books. Well, sure, it's easy to think that way if you haven't read much of anything else, and have no standard of comparison.
Along similar lines, I'd see comments from folks who read David Edding's Belgariad, and wished it had gone on forever. I read the Belgariad with reasonable pleasure. Eddings has a smooth prose style and a gift for dialog. I plowed rather grimly through the sequel, which I felt was "color by numbers" fantasy, and by the time I finished, I felt like it
had gone on forever. I discovered that Eddings has one story to tell, with one set of characters, and each series simply changes the names and files off the serial numbers.
And then there were the folks who read Terry Brook's "Shanarra" books, and thought LoTR was a rip off. Er, savvy copyright date? Tolkien
wrote these books before Terry was
born...
I haven't read the HP books yet -- so many books, so little time -- but I know people with sophisticated tastes who are writers themselves who love them. And Rowling got a whole generation of kids reading, voluntarily. I'd forgive a number of sins for that.
Tolkien sits on the top of my fantasy shelf. There are a few things that might sit beside it: C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, E. R. Eddison's _The Worm Ouroborous_, Lloyd Alexander's _The Chronicles of Prydain_ - but just about everything else is second or likely third shelf.
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Dennis