Wizened old Hampstead crows have a pop at Potter

frank kogan posted me a copy of byatt's piece after i posted on this thread, i think teasingly to say "haha you are saying the same as a. s. byatt"

(!?)

I used to be pretty much pro-Byatt on the 'adults reading Harry Potter on the tube' thing until Isabel pointed out to me that a lot of them will be reading it to get some kind of empathic handle on what their kids are obsessed with. And as for the rest it's the tube for God's sake.

I'm with Byatt, if not the others. She isn't anti it pper se, just wary that the freedom of saying its alright for adults to read kids books, has actually just led to just reading Potter (and possibly Pullman). Potter is not my cup of tea, too safe and its boarding school shenanigans harken to an England which does not and never did exist (and for all its multi-culturality it is frigenteningly middle class). The more peopel who cock a snook the better I say.

Where does Prachett hatred fit in with Lord Ov Rings /Potter/Pullman loving (all fantasy after all - which always struck me the biggest strike agin him was the setting).

I don't think the Tube is the right place to be reading Ulysses at all... Harry Potter has the advantage of being easy to read and hard to be distracted from, ergo it is perfect Tube reading. Obviously I would never read it on the Tube, mostly because it is massive, but then again I am the sort of person who chooses my commuting reading mostly because I'm hoping that it will make foxy intellectual girls strike up a conversation.

Tom's Potter/Tolkein/Girls Aloud/Travis comment is OTM. Byatt appears to have completely missed the point of what the books are FOR.

Pratchett = Pickwick with wizards, whereas Potter = Blyton with wizards, obviously.

Pete 25-35 year olds can have Potter-loving-age kids can't they? I don't think it's 'most' by any means but it's a chunk of the readership.

well you can't go wrong with 'ulysses' though no conversations were made when i was reading it :-(

I put this all down to the decline in the lending library btw.

I am massively pro the Pixar films, which I think show a perfectly line for something accessible to all - strong robust plots with well rounded characterization (something I don't think Potter has with its" and then this happened, and then that happened breakneck pace"). Though both Toy Story films have thorough reprehensible morals - and the villains in both are the most attractive characters.

I read a lot when younger and I recently reread some of the old books I'd enjoyed. The Moomins are magnificent as ever, beautiful works of art. Susan Cooper was worthy but dull. Dr Who novels were atrociously written with plywood characterisation and numbingly functional prose. But all these books sparked my imagination back then in roughly equal degrees - the whole thing about being a child is that you're filling in gaps for yourself in a largely difficult-to-comprehend universe. What Rowling has done is created an amazingly compelling (for children) structure with enough gaps left in it for kids' minds to romp - it's not all about escapism at all.

x-post: well saying its for ppl who 'lack imagination' blah blah is a v suspicious arg. maybe ppl who are into things like reality TV or cartoons don't lack imagination, you know (well actually ppl who are into raelity TV do ;-)).

i think the "snobbery" line against byatt is a bit of a red herring, as wielded by "charles taylor of salon", but i am a kidlit fanatic after all, and (so far) rowling is the [insert correct pop/rock group here] of kidlit

I'm torn on S Club 8. I prefered ver 7. Childrens Books != books written by children.

Pratchett fits pretty well into an all ages fiction area too (I reckon its big on the 14 year old boy front). But a little goes a long way. Be interesting if the did adult cover editions though (Josh Kirby must go).

Now that 16yr old writing about pop in the Guardian last week. ho ho

(haha it's really easy to mistype yr name as aslan!!)

This kind of thing happened to Stephen King too - though later on he noticed it and started experimenting (with to be fair pretty poor results).

Matt, who does the Kirby-esque covers now. They must go.

very afar

Hang on, if it never existed, doesn't that mean that every boarding school story ever is a target for the same criticism (er, what is your criticism?)?

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying in the parenthesis: certainly the malfoys are the equivalent of landed gentry, while Neville's family are poor as dirt (and the Weasleys).

I think Byatt is wrong in a lot of her assertations about popular culture nevertheless to set herself up as a straw doll in this way to get a little bit of reaction. Weldon is right I think in her softly softly reaction to be disconcerted by the Potter on the tube phenom - the question is why is she (and I) disconcerted by this. Am I just some sort of hideous educationalist. Is it that fiction market is not catering for adults (a whip back at the conversation we had earlier). Or is it that a lot of people are not willing to take risks in their choice of reading matter.

We've already proved

http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/harry_potter/images/1.jpg = http://www.otherminds.org/images/GIFS2/Scanner2.gif

"People would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys."

"The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do."

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."

"Most people develop their social conscience when young, during that brief period between leaving school and discovering that injustice isn't all bad."

"A good general always knows when to leave the battlefield, and as far as Lord Fang was concerned, it was when he saw the enemy coming towards him."

I'm not a great fan of Pratchett, but Byatt was right about the sentences, in my opinion.

Only were he named Greenspan ...

Righhhhhht. I was gonna say something about humorlessness and a weird analytic frigidity, but, um, not much left to.

(and me i was hoping it would lure mark to post more!)