My own self

Rowling doesn’t reach Gaiman to his ankles in a technical study, but she had a brilliant idea at a time that every teenager and child was growing cynical and losing faith in the idea of Magic. Harry Potter became the modern version of a fairy tale, making adults and youths alike imagining a world much like our own, but flavored with something of the extraordinary.

Seems it is inescapable these days, so here goes.

In response to a blog-post by Lothair Mantelar.

What you’re saying, about HP being the first fantasy (or even the first more or less adult literature) one’s introduced to, might explain a lot of people’s relationship to these books. I quite loved the first three, but I didn’t start reading the series ’til all the first three were already released (and that in Norwegian), ’cause it just looked plain silly to me. (I did, though, in the interest of full disclosure, find them to be far less silly than I'd expected, this I will readily admit) I’d been reading fantasy for… I guess at least four years at that point, probably more, and while the books were entertaining enough, never, ever did they blow me away. The world struck me as simplistic and childish, at that point in time I think I’d probably called it the least impressive fantasy world I’d read anything out of. The prose was fast-paced, at least in the first three books it felt like that to me, and captivating, but it never felt extraordinary. Nor did the characters. The four only characters I remember to this day with some fondness (I’ve read the first four books, so you know what basis I’m saying this from) is Hagrid (not a very original character but maybe the one with the most depth that I can remember from this particular series), Snape (who’d be the possible tie in the depth-department, and slightly more original, to my great joy. Was thrilled to find Rickman would portray him in the movies, I recall), Lupus and obviously Dumbledore. I also liked Sirius and Malfoy Sr. a good bit back then, but all these are sadly stereotypical and flat characters (though for all I know they could be deeply fleshed out in subsequent books) The Big Bad himself was never interesting at all, save in his incarnation as his younger self in the journal Harry finds in the second book. Nor were really any of the three main characters remotely exciting beyond the “Adequate protagonist material”-level. Hands down, though, I did enjoy the books, and I probably will finish this series at some point.

The reason I went off on this ramble, anyway, was that you made me realize, I read the books too late in my reading-process. When you’ve read, I guess at that point, five books in WoT, a handful in SoT, everything Tolkien wrote on Middle-Earth more or less, The Solitaire-mystery and Sofie’s World, the Chronicles of Narnia, half the first Deverry-cycle, all of the Belgariad, the Riftwar Trilogy, a couple of Thomas Covenant-books and a bunch of Verne and Dumas a handful of times each, there is nothing about Hogwarts and its world that seem remotely original or extraordinarily interesting. If anything, the world struck me as kind of cheesy, much like Artemis Fowl’s world would some years later. And the writing, as you say, isn’t all that, though to my young eyes at least it was far from weak, that must be said.

So I’ve never been able to resummon the first spike of interest I had in the series all those years ago for the much-needed reread I have to do before I can keep on reading it. And even if I could, it wouldn’t be prioritixzed over catching up on Malazan, Sword of Truth, Deverry, Midkemia, or even Wheel of Time. Nor would I put it above reading, say, more Gaiman or giving authors like Robin Hobb or your much-pimped Lynch a shot.

Thus my conundrum. I seem doomed to forever be stuck in a HP-limbo where I want to read the rest of the series, I just don’t want it enough to actually do so.

Thanks very much for making me feel slightly better about never getting around to it with this post of yours.