I'm excited! Is anyone else excited?
Kind of, actually. I wasn't huge into HP after the fourth book or so came out, but she's a better writer than we usually get in the mainstream these days.
That said, the hype might kill this book before it comes out.
I'm only excited if it means Elizier Yudowsky will start posting chapters of HPMoR (http://hpmor.com/) again, to capitalize off the publicity.
And, I just feel this is necessary to point out, but unless you're a child, Rowling is not that great a writer. Or, rather, we have nothing to judge Rowling's writing intended for adults by. She seems a nice lady, and certainly patient when dealing with her insane fanbase, but her books are a hodgepodge of "you are the chosen one" fantasy, tween angst and utterly incompetent main characters.
True, but since she's (primarily, sort of) a children's fiction writer, nobody expects her to go Dostoevsky on us.
I'm referring less to the technical aspects of her writing and more about the idea that it has something resembling a meaning, as opposed to writers like Stephanie Meyer or John Grisham. Those bastards.
Quote from: Cain on March 04, 2012, 04:22:13 PM
I'm only excited if it means Elizier Yudowsky will start posting chapters of HPMoR (http://hpmor.com/) again, to capitalize off the publicity.
And, I just feel this is necessary to point out, but unless you're a child, Rowling is not that great a writer. Or, rather, we have nothing to judge Rowling's writing intended for adults by. She seems a nice lady, and certainly patient when dealing with her insane fanbase, but her books are a hodgepodge of "you are the chosen one" fantasy, tween angst and utterly incompetent main characters.
I agree with this. Harry Potter is shit, but Yudowsky's fanfiction makes it incredible. That said, it makes a better moral document than any mainstream religious text.
I have a way of choosing what I read so that I don't get too bogged down with too serious or heavy stuff. Harry Potter came into the something light and fun or a children's book. I was little mitre than a child when I first stated reading them and by the fifth one I was hooked.
I agree with Cain regarding some of the fan made work. I think when it's good it can to the HP universe beautifully and when it's bad I ignore it :)
Unless it's that encyclopedia she keeps promising us, I probably don't care.
Ah, yes, i'm actually pretty exited. I think she's a great writer, good at planning her plot out and hooking the readers. Also, she said in an interwiev that this book would be an adult's book and nothing like Happy Potter, so i'm looking forward to see how she'll treat a more mature audience.
As each Harry Potter book came out, I think she did a great job of growing with her audience. I hope this new book extends that in a way. I'm also hoping for no magic just to see her writing without what some people have called the gimmicky parts.
I still think she should write Harry Potter and the Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis, a financial thriller about how Harry Potter, as managing director of Gringott's investment arm, must figure out how to stop the global wizarding economy from imploding after a risky scheme involving CDOs and playing the housing market goes awry.
:lulz:
You know, I really would totally read that.
Would Harry get really depressed and not talk to anyone who knew anything about the problem for 85% of the book?
He'd try, but human resources would worry about his withdrawn nature and refer him to a therapist.
My fanfic senses are tingling :p
JK Rowling's writing is puerile shit. That Harry Potter is so popular says less about her talent than it does about the awful degradation that has happened in young adult literature in the last couple decades and the accompanying decrease in both the expectations and good taste of the relevant audience.
For the love of GAWD someone please link to LMNO's fanfic piece ITT.
You mean the HP troll slash? I think Suu has those links. IIR, they still get horrified/creepy complimentary comments.
Yep, that's the one.
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 02:49:41 AM
JK Rowling's writing is puerile shit. That Harry Potter is so popular says less about her talent than it does about the awful degradation that has happened in young adult literature in the last couple decades and the accompanying decrease in both the expectations and good taste of the relevant audience.
Can you expand on this please?
Quote from: Danjanon on March 08, 2012, 05:59:56 AM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 02:49:41 AM
JK Rowling's writing is puerile shit. That Harry Potter is so popular says less about her talent than it does about the awful degradation that has happened in young adult literature in the last couple decades and the accompanying decrease in both the expectations and good taste of the relevant audience.
Can you expand on this please?
Her books are considered good and great because the bar of good or great is so fucking low now.
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 02:49:41 AM
For the love of GAWD someone please link to LMNO's fanfic piece ITT.
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on March 08, 2012, 04:11:30 AM
You mean the HP troll slash? I think Suu has those links. IIR, they still get horrified/creepy complimentary comments.
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 05:06:52 AM
Yep, that's the one.
You asked for it...
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,15967.0.html
I never
did finish all the stories I meant to write.
Quote from: Guru Coyote on March 08, 2012, 07:53:27 AM
Quote from: Danjanon on March 08, 2012, 05:59:56 AM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 02:49:41 AM
JK Rowling's writing is puerile shit. That Harry Potter is so popular says less about her talent than it does about the awful degradation that has happened in young adult literature in the last couple decades and the accompanying decrease in both the expectations and good taste of the relevant audience.
Can you expand on this please?
Her books are considered good and great because the bar of good or great is so fucking low now.
I understood that :). Instead of just criticism I was looking for things like examples and comparisons etc. You've said it's puerile, why and how is it pueril?
Quote from: Danjanon on March 08, 2012, 09:34:41 PM
Quote from: Guru Coyote on March 08, 2012, 07:53:27 AM
Quote from: Danjanon on March 08, 2012, 05:59:56 AM
Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on March 08, 2012, 02:49:41 AM
JK Rowling's writing is puerile shit. That Harry Potter is so popular says less about her talent than it does about the awful degradation that has happened in young adult literature in the last couple decades and the accompanying decrease in both the expectations and good taste of the relevant audience.
Can you expand on this please?
Her books are considered good and great because the bar of good or great is so fucking low now.
I understood that :). Instead of just criticism I was looking for things like examples and comparisons etc. You've said it's puerile, why and how is it pueril?
I would like to know that too. :)
I'm certainly not going to subject myself to re-reading it to satisfy your desire for specific examples (I suspect if I have to explain that specifically it might be pointless anyway) but as for comparisons, well, LotR springs immediately to mind as does Terry Pratchett's or Tad Williams' stuff.
The last time I read Harry Potter I was over 10 years ago. All I know was that, one I shouldn't be bothering with children's books at that age, and two I had read more advanced stuff at a younger age. I also think Robert Jordan was a terrible author, and no I won't bother with specifics. The majority of fantasy that has been written over the last 20 years has been garbage, and the stuff over the last 10 has been really bad. I'm looking at you urban modern fantasy genre.
I'm gonna say one thing in favor of JK Rowling: At the end of each book, when Harry defeats whatever it was he was dealing with, there are still lingering consequences that come back to plague him, which is unusually realistic for the genre.
That being said, Dumbledore was the most derivative character in the history of fantasy, with the exception of this shit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuck_Underbank
I've read one book of the series at the link, and there has NEVER been a more shameless ripoff of Tolkien, ever.
I genuinely enjoyed the first couple of books when I read them as a kid. Then again, I also enjoyed Eragon the first time I read it (on the re-reading I was like WTF is this shit, and then I couldn't remember which orc-substitute belonged to Eragon and which belonged to the Wheel of Time series, they blended together so much.)
Lately, I've been reading a lot of unprofessionally translated or double-translated (as in, eng translation by way of of chinese translation) novels. One thing I've realized is that as long as your characters are kinda likeable, you can get away with a lot of bad writing if you get the pacing and dramatic tension right. IIRC the first two HP books did a really good job of building the right amount of tension as various things happened and they figured more stuff out, and then finishing off the book with with really cool climactic scenes with characters doing cool stuff. Like, adventure porn or something.
And I hated Dolores Umbridge (in the "I want this character to lose" sense, not the "I don't like reading about this character" sense) more than I hated any fictional character before or since. It's a shame Rowling chose to have her get gang-raped by centaurs instead of suffering any meaningful defeat.
Yeah, but it's more realistic*. Evil people hardly ever lose.
In fact, when bad shit happens to them, they use it as a sign that they are on the Right Path and whip up a following of people who need a screaming psycho to follow in some hate fueled rampage.
Please to note I laughed at myself derisively, considering the context of the book.
Quote from: Golden Applesauce on March 09, 2012, 03:50:13 AM
And I hated Dolores Umbridge (in the "I want this character to lose" sense, not the "I don't like reading about this character" sense) more than I hated any fictional character before or since. It's a shame Rowling chose to have her get gang-raped by centaurs instead of suffering any meaningful defeat.
Hey....the day I get gang raped by centaurs is the day I consider myself permanently defeated.
Uh oh, my slash gland is acting up...
H. (tt) P., colon, slash, slash ...
(http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/651403_700b.jpg)
I find myself in a position where I pretty much can't assess J.K. Rowling as an author, due to nostalgia lenses having become fused to my corneas.
I'm part of that age bracket that was almost exactly the same age as the main characters for most of the series, so when I started reading it around age 12, my standards for literature weren't exactly what you'd call cultivated.
I'll admit I was hooked; I re-read most of the early books more times than I can remember (and that's not me feigning forgetfulness to save face: I actually lost count of how many times I read the first few books). Towards the end of it though, when book seven was finally on the horizon, I was excited, but at that point it was mostly to see how JKR intended to wrap up all of this insanity she'd built up for so long.
Then it ended, and so did my fanboyism. I can admit that, yeah, it probably isn't all that great, or even very good at all depending on your criteria. But simply admitting that doesn't remove the fact that, when I was reading them, I enjoyed the shit out of them.
It's probably telling, though, that now that I'm done with it all, I really don't have a desire to go back to them again. My childhood and teenage years are where it belongs, and where it will probably stay.
Really, my experience is quite similar. Where we differ, my fan boyism waned at movie 5, but came back with all the hype for 7 and 7.2. I'm excited for Pottermore and want to visit the theme park one day, and I'm soon going to start on the Stephen Fry audio books. I may be hooked for life after Sir Stephen's read to me :S
I disagree with ECH that young adult fiction has gone down the tubes, in the same way that I would disagree with anyone who said fiction in general has gone down the tubes. For whatever reason, YA authors are writing the best damn dystopian novels of today. Feed (http://www.amazon.com/Feed-M-T-Anderson/dp/0763622591) alone is horrifying and the reason I will never EVER let anyone stick an internet connection in my head.
What has been and continues to be true, is that most of the heavily reported fiction, the high rollers, the NYT bestsellers, are mediocre. But there are exceptions, Pat Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trillogy (http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/content/books.asp) being an excellent fantasy example.
There will always be a mixture of crap, mediocrity, and goodness, with the most praised tending towards the middle variety, especially in this country.
Call me crazy, and I'm not a huge Rowling fan by any means, but I think a lot of Tolkien's characters had even less depth than Rowlings. I personally have a hard time finding anything in the fantasy genre worth reading anymore. George R.R. Martin is fucking top notch, but it's hard to think of anything else I give two shits about. Tolkien was pretty fun, when he wasn't droning on for 3 pages about what was on the dinner table, but I think many can say the same for Rowlings work.. fun, sure. What I really look for is character depth though, and very few works in that genre have adequately satisfied that appetite.
Quote from: ZL 'Kai' Burington, M.S. on March 30, 2012, 10:37:32 PM
I disagree with ECH that young adult fiction has gone down the tubes, in the same way that I would disagree with anyone who said fiction in general has gone down the tubes. For whatever reason, YA authors are writing the best damn dystopian novels of today. Feed (http://www.amazon.com/Feed-M-T-Anderson/dp/0763622591) alone is horrifying and the reason I will never EVER let anyone stick an internet connection in my head.
What has been and continues to be true, is that most of the heavily reported fiction, the high rollers, the NYT bestsellers, are mediocre. But there are exceptions, Pat Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trillogy (http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/content/books.asp) being an excellent fantasy example.
There will always be a mixture of crap, mediocrity, and goodness, with the most praised tending towards the middle variety, especially in this country.
I've really got to read that.
Quote from: Vaud on March 30, 2012, 11:39:00 PM
Call me crazy, and I'm not a huge Rowling fan by any means, but I think a lot of Tolkien's characters had even less depth than Rowlings. I personally have a hard time finding anything in the fantasy genre worth reading anymore. George R.R. Martin is fucking top notch, but it's hard to think of anything else I give two shits about. Tolkien was pretty fun, when he wasn't droning on for 3 pages about what was on the dinner table, but I think many can say the same for Rowlings work.. fun, sure. What I really look for is character depth though, and very few works in that genre have adequately satisfied that appetite.
Alas, Sturgeon's Law must raise its ugly head when considering fantasy fiction: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Some of us were discussing fantasy books in another thread. For fantasy with good character depth, I'd recommend:
Malazan, Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson (I haven't read it myself, but there's significant overlap between fans of this series and fans of GRR Martin, so I'm planning to give it a look).
The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. Scott Bakker (nearly half of these books are about what's going on inside the character's heads, and that's a good thing)
The
Taltos series by Steven Brust (much lighter-hearted than Martin or the above two recommendations, but still very character-focused)
I'm probably forgetting a bunch, but I'm finding it harder than I thought to distill "focus on character depth" from "focus on plot." I'm a sucker for either if they're well-written, but I can see how one would have a preference for one or the other.
Tolkein gets pass points, because a) he did it first and b) all the world-building.
Rowling gets pass points because her story was designed for children. It did admittedly warp into some kind of strange YA thing by about book five, and not entirely successfully, but nevertheless.
Quote from: Cainad on March 31, 2012, 04:38:37 PM
Quote from: Vaud on March 30, 2012, 11:39:00 PM
Call me crazy, and I'm not a huge Rowling fan by any means, but I think a lot of Tolkien's characters had even less depth than Rowlings. I personally have a hard time finding anything in the fantasy genre worth reading anymore. George R.R. Martin is fucking top notch, but it's hard to think of anything else I give two shits about. Tolkien was pretty fun, when he wasn't droning on for 3 pages about what was on the dinner table, but I think many can say the same for Rowlings work.. fun, sure. What I really look for is character depth though, and very few works in that genre have adequately satisfied that appetite.
Alas, Sturgeon's Law must raise its ugly head when considering fantasy fiction: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Some of us were discussing fantasy books in another thread. For fantasy with good character depth, I'd recommend:
Malazan, Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson (I haven't read it myself, but there's significant overlap between fans of this series and fans of GRR Martin, so I'm planning to give it a look).
The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. Scott Bakker (nearly half of these books are about what's going on inside the character's heads, and that's a good thing)
The Taltos series by Steven Brust (much lighter-hearted than Martin or the above two recommendations, but still very character-focused)
I'm probably forgetting a bunch, but I'm finding it harder than I thought to distill "focus on character depth" from "focus on plot." I'm a sucker for either if they're well-written, but I can see how one would have a preference for one or the other.
Thanks! Without really saying it, I was hoping for some good recommendations. I will definitely check these out, and get back to you when I do.
I'll say this, the Malazan Books of the Fallen are not great for characterization. What they are good at is being atypical of the genre. You won't get depth of character along the lines of George RR Martin, except possibly with a few characters (Karsa Orlong comes to mind, and to an extent Ganoes Paran), but the vast majority of characters are cynical soldiers with a warped sense of humour. But you won't mind this because a) you'll be spending most of your time trying to figure out what is going on* and b) you'll be going oh shit whenever a major convergence happens**.
In fact, in some ways, the book goes out of its way to draw attention to the fact it's not characterising certain people at all, such as Adjunct Tavore. Even by the end of the series, she's still something of a mystery to all involved.
* Fun exercise for the reader: figure out whose side Ammanas is on. Even more fun exercise: whose side is Lassen on?
** Convergence is the in-built tendency in the world for power to attract power. What this usually results in is several dozen extremely dangerous people/things/gods being in the same area when something serious is going down.