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Originally Posted by HarryT
The Harry Potter books honestly are not written for 8-year-olds.
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Famously (and perhaps notoriously),
Harold Bloom disagreed.
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What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
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Imagine what he might have thought about repetition in Lord Dunsany (would he have considered "the fields we know" to be a cliche?)!