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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Feb 11, 2021 21:14:41 GMT
Shit for kids. Its popularity with adults is sign of an infantile culture.
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Post by tory on Feb 11, 2021 22:25:31 GMT
The books aren't great. The prose is unimaginative and never gets anywhere particularly exciting. Even my son at 7 says that they"re "lean". I've been reading Katherine Rundell's books to him and she is marvellous.
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Post by harrylemon on Feb 12, 2021 9:16:18 GMT
The notion that an adult can't read a book written for children. Is intellectual snobbery of the highest order.
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Feb 12, 2021 9:50:10 GMT
It's not that they can't - it's a reaction to the idea that they SHOULD. Like there aren't 500 million better fucking books around. It's the lack of imagination on the part of the consumer. It does honestly piss me off
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Feb 12, 2021 10:00:27 GMT
Another thing about Harry Potter books - they're HUGE in China. To the point where I never heard a single student mention anything else when asked about their preferred reading.
The first couple of times it was a bit surprising to hear ('oh really? is Harry Potter popular in China then?'), then you'd come to expect it - then after hearing those two words every single fucking time the topic of reading was brought up, you'd try to move them along to a different topic. Or preempt the mention by saying 'do you read anything other than Harry Potter books?' - to which they'd reply 'ah ha! how you know I like Harry Potter books?'. Etc. etc. etc.
I never found out why this was such a thing (apart from the fact that they're popular everywhere, of course). Maybe there's nothing in those pages which insults the CCP. Maybe JK Rowling struck a deal with Xi.
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Post by DarknessFish on Feb 12, 2021 11:24:57 GMT
No, there's that classic moment in Harry Potter and the Wizard's Sleeve, where Hermione refuses to sleep with Anglezarke, and he shouts angrily, "You're as cold and arid as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region during the great leap forward, when massively exaggerated expectations for grain yields due to corruption and a climate of fear, combined with a disastrous collectivisation of the proletariat led to one of the world's worst famines."
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Feb 12, 2021 11:30:55 GMT
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Post by bungo the mungo on Feb 13, 2021 18:22:19 GMT
The notion that an adult can't read a book written for children. Is intellectual snobbery of the highest order. i have to agree with jeemo, despite him getting the covid jab ahead of my mother. like ray, my favourite book is 'wind in the willows'.
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Post by sloopjohnc on Feb 13, 2021 19:32:31 GMT
I read all the books to my daughter at bedtime. Probably two or three years worth for 1/2 hour, 45 minutes every night. I like them, but agree with some of the critcisms. The movies did a good job recreating the books.
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Feb 14, 2021 21:06:06 GMT
The notion that an adult can't read a book written for children. Is intellectual snobbery of the highest order. i have to agree with jeemo, despite him getting the covid jab ahead of my mother. like ray, my favourite book is 'wind in the willows'. Kenneth Grahame's other books are about chidhood, but written for adults. WITW, despite its genesis in bedtime stories he told his only son (who committed suicide while at university, walking in front of a moving train), is also structured around pagan and magickal beliefs held by KBG, and the three 'interpolated' chapters (Dulce Domum, Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Wayfarers All), which do not advance the story at all, are also aimed fair and square at adult readers (although I loved all three right from the first reading when I was about eight), both in terms of the themes and of the gloriously poetic language, and are usually left out completely in dramatisations, and sometimes in editions aimed at children.
The same can be said of Pullman's absolutely wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy (although Pullman is very much against the idea of books being targetted at age- or sex-related groups, believing that readers should be allowed to make up their own minds): Alan Garner is another whose 'children's books' are actually nothing of the sort.
The problem with JKR, though, is that, while she can spin a page-turning narrative, her prose is more than a bit leaden. The first book is clearly moulded for a youthful reading age and, following her huge success, the later books have been given hands-off editing. Chip, who was a literacy teacher in her earlier years, thought that JKR deserved huge praise for getting boys to read books for fun, but neither she (a voracious reader) nor I ever managed to get through one because of the limited language and long passages of dull exposition and description. The plots and concepts are pretty much reworkings of standard children's lit tropes, as well, not that it wasn't well done. Certainly more readable for adults than Frank Richards or Enid Blyton, of course, but then again, aren't we all?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2021 23:14:33 GMT
The BBC's version of his dark materials is boring and unengaging. I plowed through the first season and was glad it finished. No interest in the 2nd.
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Feb 14, 2021 23:38:39 GMT
I was talking about the books. especially the Amber Spyglass, which strikes me as a masterpiece and easily the best I've read this century. The BBC adaptation is irrelevant, although I thought the production values were good, even though Cardiff is a poor substitute for Oxford - it's certainly better than the Hollywood version of Northern Lights, which stank the place out. All kinds of material from the second book were intercut with the first in the first series, which is disorientating: I'll watch the second and third, of course - I'm intrigued to see how they will show the mulefa, for instance - but in no huge hurry: apples and oranges.
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Post by tory on Feb 15, 2021 9:21:50 GMT
The Potter books have clawed back some kids from screens to a certain extent, so they should be lauded for that. Primary school teaching is now heavily focused on literacy and my son's school is huge on reading, particularly in school. AFAIK on a normal school day, they spend 30-45 minutes in class reading silently and an accelerated reader scheme then tests them on their comprehension of the book they've read. And in many respects, the Harry Potter series has been a part of that - he's read all of them three times in the 6 weeks from Xmas to Half-term. H
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Post by sloopjohnc on Feb 15, 2021 14:52:45 GMT
The Potter books have clawed back some kids from screens to a certain extent, so they should be lauded for that. Primary school teaching is now heavily focused on literacy and my son's school is huge on reading, particularly in school. AFAIK on a normal school day, they spend 30-45 minutes in class reading silently and an accelerated reader scheme then tests them on their comprehension of the book they've read. And in many respects, the Harry Potter series has been a part of that - he's read all of them three times in the 6 weeks from Xmas to Half-term. H Both my kids are very good readers and writers and the Harry Potter books play a big part in that. When they were young, I also read them a kids' bible and greek myths because I found knowing them was very helpful in studying comparitive lit and literature in general when I was in college. I was amazed so few of my fellow students couldn't recognize the analogies. Much of western lit uses both sources as ongoing themes.
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Post by tory on Feb 15, 2021 15:00:27 GMT
The number of people who have little or no understanding of either the Bible or Greek myths in general depresses me. What I will say though is that the publishing industry, particularly here in the UK, falls over itself to publish books about Greek/Viking Myths for kids. Loads of them, and often in great detail and highly stylised too. You'll also get books all about other cultures. And yet, the number of books that are published about the Bible, apart from say, Usborne, is weak in comparison. Often, the books on the Bible are out of date and just look shite.
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