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I just wrote a long entry, forgot to copy'n'paste, and LJ munched it.

Short version: brilliant weekend, loads of books bought, countryside nice and want to live in place where it is extremely quiet indeed, email has been fried since yesterday afternoon until this afternoon, got several rather crushing deadlines at end of the month so may well disappear for a couple of weeks or else will be procrastinating wildly and constantly online.

And here's an article by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

altariel.livejournal.com

There's definitely something of an irregular verb going on there, I think:

- I find Tolkien restful
- You are comfort reading
- She engages in regressive latency-period fantasies

Myself, I read Georgette Heyer novels because I think they crack along at a smashing old pace and are really well-executed, researched and characterized. And because secretly I want to be able to write books like that when I grow up, only with guns and spaceships.

On the other hand, I do think that the Harry Potter books aren't that great and that there are much better children's fantasy writers out there - like Susan Cooper or Diana Wynne Jones. But if one child has started reading just because of Harry Potter, that alone justifies their existence. And of course I'll keep on reading them.

Plus there are those of us who can still feel that 'shiver of awe' she describes at Tolkien. But that's just a regressive latency-period fantasy, I guess. Excuse me while I go and watch some DS9 over lunch. Guns - *and* spaceships!

From:

katlinel.livejournal.com

Personally, practically everything I do is looked down on by some group or another so I frankly don't give a rat's ass if Byatt (or Marina Warner - see the Guardian web sites) thinks I'm infantile. I'll carry on reading Byatt, Warner and Rowling. I wonder if anyone has bothered to look at what else adults who read Rowling also read?

OK, I haven't read this article (I got suspicious when the site required salary information) but I've read some of the reactions to the article, and I wonder why on earth do people persist in treating Rowling's books as exemplars of the fantasy genre when they're not?

They are, primarily, boarding school stories and they are much more in the tradition of Blyton and Brent-Dyer, and probably Oxenham, Fairlie Bruce and Brazil. There is very little point in continuing to compare Rowling to Tolkien, Pratchett and LeGuin when she's writing in a quite different tradition. Indeed, the reaction to Rowling is so similar to Blyton, it's scary - children love them, the establishment (in Blyton's case teachers and librarians, in Rowling's, the literary (both mainstream and genre, judging by the SF lit con I went to earlier this year) looks down on them.

Now Wynne Jones has written a couple of fantasy boarding school stories (Witch Week and The Year of the Griffin are two that I've read) and </>DragonSinger:Harper of Pern is also classic boarding school stuff but these aren't the books that most people are using for comparison.

Maybe this is because most of the critics doing lit-snob comparisons haven't read that widely in genre. (Oh look, Tolkien and Pratchett have elves, LeGuin has wizards, and Rowling has elves and wizards, therefore they are writing the same sort of book. That is not lit crit - that's just bloody lazy.) LeGuin's Earthsea writing might happen to involve a school of wizardry but she most emphatically is not writing a boarding school story.

Examples? Well, Rowling's Potions classes match so well to Domestic Science classes, it's uncanny. The scene where Ron chops up Malfoy's roots roughly and is then made to exchange them with his own neatly cut ones is pure Chalet School. Quidditch, while mapping on to football in the wider world, within the context of the school correlates to lacrosse (even to the risk of injury).

This isn't to say that the fantasy element is not important, I just don't think it's central.

I also think there's a fair bit of Grange Hill in there too. (Harry, Ron and Hermione versus Tucker, Alan and Benny).

I am also wondering if the later books will become closer to the boarding school stories written for adults (such as White's Frost In May and Lambert's No Talking After Lights

So until the lit critics start reviewing this books in the context of the genre to which they truly belong, I for one, am not going to consider their opinions as worth it.

So there.

From:

altariel.livejournal.com

I wonder why on earth do people persist in treating Rowling's books as exemplars of the fantasy genre when they're not? ... They are, primarily, boarding school stories and they are much more in the tradition of Blyton and Brent-Dyer...

You patiently keep on saying this to me and I keep being incredibly thick-skulled about it, but you're completely right. Be patient with me! *g*

I've been reading OotP this weekend, and thinking more and more in terms of The Naughtiest Girl books. And Grange Hill.

I've copied'n'pasted the Byatt article and emailed it to you. (I couldn't find the Marina Warner articles in the Guardian, but I did find this, which is about one of Tove Jansson's novels for adults coming back into print - don't know if you've seen this already.)

Indeed, the reaction to Rowling is so similar to Blyton, it's scary - children love them, the establishment [snip] looks down on them.

I so much want you to research and write about this: "(Un)Receptive Audiences: children's and literary readings of Blyton and Rowling."

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the fantasy element in the Harry Potter books is that it gives the literary establishment an 'easy target' at which to direct its complaints? Thinking out loud. Or in text, anyway.

From:

executrix.livejournal.com

How about "The Men Don't Like It But the Little Girls Understand"?

From:

katlinel.livejournal.com

Thank you for the Byatt article. I'll comment later - visitors at the moment.

Here's the Marina Warner one:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,996243,00.html

The words altariel1 and thick-skulled just do not belong in the same sentence, unless separated by is the opposite of. I'm just harping on - thank you for your patience.

Thanks for the link to the Jansson one - that sounds like a must-read to me.

I think you're probably right about the fantasy element making it an easier target for some.

Sigh. I enjoy the HP books, I think they're a great read, but I don't love them as much as many others. I'm just narked at all the stone-throwing. Oh well, apparently everyone has to despise someone.

From:

altariel.livejournal.com

The words altariel1 and thick-skulled just do not belong in the same sentence

I can be extremely pig-headed at times - it's that inferior Se.

Sigh. I enjoy the HP books, I think they're a great read, but I don't love them as much as many others. I'm just narked at all the stone-throwing. Oh well, apparently everyone has to despise someone.

I read the first three incredibly rapidly, and I loved the third one, particularly when Harry sees the stag. The fourth needed a good edit.

I'm enjoying OotP a great deal, actually - thought it was slow starting, but I've been cracking through it today.

I don't know what it is about them that keeps on making me feel so ambivalent towards them - well, I do know, it's the amount of hype and my deep envy of her vast fortune. Mr Altariel really can't abide them.

Mr Altariel... I should just call him Celeborn and have done, for he is surely accounted wise, and I have indeed dwelt with him years uncounted (well, ten), and together through ages of the world (it seems) we have fought the long defeat (little bit of politics).