Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I meant the series by J.K. Rowling. If there is a character by that name in one or more of Steven King's books I was unaware of it. There was a character named Harry Potter Jr. in the movie "Troll" though.  A lot of the really long 500 + page books that are out there are the old classics. They had to be long for several reasons. 1st there were no pictures of real world settings which is why in books like Ben-Hur for example have long passages of description present. Also there was less variety for entertainment back then. And of course writers didn't make a lot of $ often making it by the word so that they were encouraged to write long rather than the short, quick writing we know today. Some of the PD books were in fact serialized in newspapers before being set up in book form. If you have to write 2,000 words a week for a newspaper and you try to keep the storyline going for as long as possible you get a fairly long manuscript after a while. 2k * 25 weeks = 50k words in 6.25 months. Which isn't to say there aren't still some long books today certainly. The Wheel of Time series has some fairly thick books. |
Yes, Harry Potter is present in one of the Dark Tower books, not that I know which one. I hope you weren't experimental enough to watch Troll 2.
I have heard, one time, the arguments you have given me that are meant to cut classics' author some slack. Neither they need me, being dead, nor do I need them or their books. I may be missing something, but with each passing year that seems unlikely for me. I am a contemporaneous reader. E.g I've read 14 books that were published in 2014. Many of them got 4 stars from me.
Having been brought up on Enid Blyton and Herge and Rene Goscinny, I fit ill with meandering novels. Also since English is not my first, or even second language, descriptive passages lose me. There are a lot of words that I can't understand in Fantasy, and that's just words that exist in the dictionary. But I appreciate your concern for my reading choices.
PS - I've heard the Wheel of Time series dips in quality once the new author steps in.