Harry Potter criticism: fucking halfwits

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My gal read my favorite book, When Gravity Fails, and in exchange I am reading the first Harry Potter book. I don't think it's her favorite book or anything, but she wanted me to read it.

It's not good. But hey, she didn't care for WGF. What kills me is the number of stupid people who try to review it. Look, it's a kid's book. If it got one kid to read, great.

You see stuff like this:

http://mythicscribes.com/analysis/harry-potter-rocked/

I have heard many people (some on this very site) call JK Rowling the Queen of Characterization. But how did she do it? What made her so successful?

Rowling followed a very simple rule: Show, don’t tell.

Ah, blog posts that make you go, "Hmm!"

With that in mind, here's the last thing I read before going to bed last night. From the first book:

But from that moment on, Herminone Granger became their friend. There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

I'm trying to think of a more obvious example of TELLING rather than fucking SHOWING, and the only things that come to mind are other examples from this book.

Look, the book is fine for what it is. I'm glad the author made a billion dollars or whatever. God, it's attracted reams and acres of stupid people talking about it on the Internet, though.

[Tdarcos]

My gal read my favorite book, When Gravity Fails,

The weird thing is I just happened to read that section of The Washington Post the day that they ran G. A. Effinger's obituary. Since I was using a DOS PC at the time and Windows 95 did not yet exist that puts it 18-20 years ago. I was surprised that I would happen upon his entry and that I happened to be looking at that part of the paper that day.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

George Alec Effinger died in April of 2002, sir.

[JK Rowling]

Temporalus fuckupalus!

[Jizaboz]

I am proud to say:

Never read a Harry Potter book.
Never played a Harry Potter game.
Never seen a Harry Potter movie.

And so it will be for eternity.

When I was a kid, my substitute for this sort of thing was the Lloyd Alexander books (Book of 3, Black Cauldron, etc). I'm pretty certain it still fucking rules over this Harry Potter shit.

P.S. I can't stand when people say "HP" when talking about books. There's only one HP associated with books. That's H.P. Lovecraft.

[Tdarcos]

George Alec Effinger died in April of 2002, sir.

That's impossible. I remember reading his obituary while I was still living in Silver Spring. I moved out of there sometime before 1999 so he would have to have died sometime before then. Unless the original obituary was a mistake. But I distinctly remember reading it at the huge desk I had in my room. It was left to us by the previous tenant, it was too huge to move.

I suspect it was more like 1994-1995, not 2002. In 2002 I was living in Virginia. No, it had to be before 1999.

[pinback]

If only there was some way to look up that information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Alec_Effinger
http://www.sfgateway.com/authors/e/effinger-george/
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/arts/ ... humor.html

[Encyclopedia Brown]

Right, like we're supposed to believe the New York Times over the memory of a fucking crazy person.

[Henry Mulligan]

I think we should conduct a test, right now.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

George Alec Effinger died in April of 2002, sir.

That's impossible. I remember reading his obituary while I was still living in Silver Spring. I moved out of there sometime before 1999 so he would have to have died sometime before then. Unless the original obituary was a mistake. But I distinctly remember reading it at the huge desk I had in my room. It was left to us by the previous tenant, it was too huge to move.

I suspect it was more like 1994-1995, not 2002. In 2002 I was living in Virginia. No, it had to be before 1999.

Whoops, my bad, you were right. George Effinger was killed by a bag of Jack in the Box burgers in June of 1998. It wasn't until 2002 where they all got done fucking the corpse.

[Luke Skywalker]

That's impossible.

It's not impossible. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters.

[RC]

I wasn't expecting much when i read the Harry Potter books, and the first couple are definitely for younger readers. I thought the plot to book 4 was awful, too. But she had a way of capturing a moment, and the last few books were great.

I just remember this scene where the group was sitting in some class or another, rehashing whatever drama of the day happened, as they are supposed to be practicing this retrieval spell, with live frogs. So they're all obsessing over whatever, and she paints the picture of them sitting there chatting self-centeredly like teens do, forgetting that they're practicing with live animals, and while they talk the frog 'zoomed gloomily' back into the hand. You can see things like that when she writes them, she was very, very good at setting a scene.