Our local braid-tugging and bathing experts will resent that remark
― all cats are beautiful (silby), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:08 (four years ago) link
Sometimes I feel like the only person in my age cohort (late eighties/early nineties) who didn't, and still doesn't, get HP. There's something about the whole boarding-school setting that I find inherently repulsive. What a terrible setting for a fantasy!
― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:09 (four years ago) link
What a terrible setting for a fantasy!
One about magic, anyway.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:10 (four years ago) link
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
― pomenitul, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:12 (four years ago) link
Pol Potter: a young man discovers he has the magical powers of genocide
― sarahell, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:15 (four years ago) link
So this is apparently a thing:
https://polpotter.bandcamp.com
― pomenitul, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:16 (four years ago) link
xps actual LOL @ unperson & pomenitul
― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:18 (four years ago) link
I have vague memories of YA novels from the 70s featuring a smart awkward female protagonist who lives in NYC and may or may not be Jewish meeting a cute, cool boy she does fun things with like attending leftist discussion groups and publishing underground newspapers -- I don't think it was a series.
Sounds like a great candidate for Let's help each other identify books we dimly remember reading as kids !
― Doctor Casino, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:18 (four years ago) link
Is Pol Potter the only one allowed to wear glasses?
― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:21 (four years ago) link
listening now -- i am disappointed ...microfascism 2 seemed so promising but it just sounds like fucking around on ipad synth apps
― sarahell, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:21 (four years ago) link
In high school all the girls in my class were heavily into The Mists of Avalon, which came out 1-2 years before most of us were born.
― pomenitul, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:23 (four years ago) link
fucking around on ipad synth apps
Meant to approximate the sound of Adolf Hitler in art school iirc.
― pomenitul, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:25 (four years ago) link
oh pol potter -- i had such high hopes 4 u
― sarahell, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:25 (four years ago) link
This makes me think of Buffalo Brenda by Jill Pinkwater, but there's no main boy character in that one, just India Teidlebaum and her friend Brenda, and also it's from 1989 and they don't live in NYC. Great book though.
― Lily Dale, Friday, 24 July 2020 19:38 (four years ago) link
sarahell, that sounds like a Norma Klein novel.
― Notes on Scampo (tokyo rosemary), Friday, 24 July 2020 19:52 (four years ago) link
Between age 10 and 12 I read the first 20 Xanth novels so I could never throw stones at Potterheads.
You're brave to admit that, milo (oh shit, me too)
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 24 July 2020 20:00 (four years ago) link
I had very defined tastes in sentence-level writing and HP was too clunky for me. Pushed through the first three to see what the fuss was about and then gave up. Did read a lot of Philip Pullman though.
As someone else with very defined tastes in sentence-level writing, I would say that the Potter books hold up in quality as the series goes on better than the Pullman books are doing!
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 24 July 2020 20:06 (four years ago) link
I kinda don't want to know what these books actually were ... I am more content with my vague memories.
― sarahell, Friday, 24 July 2020 20:21 (four years ago) link
xpost Agree that The Amber Spyglass ended up being worse than anything Rowling ever wrote. Of course I had no way of knowing that at age ten, when I read The Golden Compass and the first Harry Potter book and decided I liked Pullman's writing but not Rowling's.
Pullman definitely has some irritating verbal tics, like his habit of giving all his big dramatic scenes a Biblical flavor by starting every sentence with "and." But I think overall he has more of an ear for how words sound together than Rowling does.
― Lily Dale, Friday, 24 July 2020 20:53 (four years ago) link
I have to grudgingly admit that Rowling does know how to put sentences together, and they work particularly well when read. It's just all so thin compared with a real writer like LeGuin or Tolkein or Twain.
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Friday, 24 July 2020 22:56 (four years ago) link
born '87, enjoyed the first 3 HP books well enough at the time, gave up completely after the 4th as it was so shit and have not returned
― imago, Friday, 24 July 2020 23:00 (four years ago) link
late to this but: 89, my grandmother bought me the first harry potter book around either elementary or middle school, I read a few chapters and thought it was boring, and forgot about it. then of course it blew up
― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Friday, 24 July 2020 23:32 (four years ago) link
Xpost to mookie, it wasn't really to establish punk cred lol, I wasn't going around calling Potter fans squares or anything. I was a gay kid who went to need camp and loved grindcore, HP just wasn't my deal.
Like I wrote a book report on the Chuck D biography in 8th grade and had my own zine.
― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Friday, 24 July 2020 23:35 (four years ago) link
Nerd, not need camp
couldn’t bring myself to read them, but I listened to the whole series as audiobooks
― Dan S, Friday, 24 July 2020 23:46 (four years ago) link
look, i haven't read the books so i can't possibly comment on whether not they are shit, bad writing, etc., but i know plenty of people who at a young age genuinely enjoyed them irrespective of whether or not they were objectively shit. i mean this isn't something like star wars where if you like it i will fucking come at you for your bad opinions.
― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, 24 July 2020 23:55 (four years ago) link
my youngest cousins were interested, and my pre-teen goddaughter was terrified by voldemort
I tried to experience the books from her point of view. talking with her about them is something I will remember
― Dan S, Friday, 24 July 2020 23:57 (four years ago) link
born in 88, by the time i got to high school HP book releases were the closest thing we had to a monocultural event. which still probably meant 60-70% of the kids in my school didn't read them (barring the english classes where the first book was on the curriculum)
― ℺ ☽ ⋠ ⏎ (✖), Saturday, 25 July 2020 00:08 (four years ago) link
haha yes i'm sure you were a very special child indeed! not only was harry potter 'not your deal' but decades later, for no particular reason, you can assure us that you were instead busy getting arrested and writing about chuck d. bless your heart
and you're a very special adult too! you might have considered reading harry potter now -- simply to understand the cultural impact, of course -- but you simply haven't the time while concentrating on very obscure indigenous triplet poets of whom the rest of us are woefully ignorant
i'm sure we won't have to wait long to learn more amazing factoids
― mookieproof, Saturday, 25 July 2020 04:02 (four years ago) link
oh damn son here it goes 🍿 🍿 🍿
― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Saturday, 25 July 2020 04:07 (four years ago) link
thank god S-zy hasn't posted ITT or shit would be getting really real
― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Saturday, 25 July 2020 04:10 (four years ago) link
the movie that was directed by Alfonso Cuaron holds up pretty well IIRC
― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Saturday, 25 July 2020 04:11 (four years ago) link
Fucksake, Milo - I have zero opinion on Rowling and the HP franchise apart from she’s a horrible TERF who limbered up for outing herself as such by ragging on Jeremy Corbyn for five years (funny how those things mostly go hand-in-hand).
My born-in-‘75 cousin, though, fell hard for the books as a byproduct of being depressed in her early 20s (both parents dead by her 23rd birthday) and took her 4yo to Harry Potter land or whatever when she visited me in 2015, but dropped Rowling like a hot potato when the transphobic shit started. But my cousin died in February, leaving me with nobody in my family who ‘gets it’.
― santa clause four (suzy), Saturday, 25 July 2020 05:12 (four years ago) link
Fuck you mookie. Amazing that just sharing about one's life can be derided so easily.
― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Saturday, 25 July 2020 11:41 (four years ago) link
uh mookie i'm not particularly sure why table's post inspired such an incredibly hostile response from you
― Kate (rushomancy), Saturday, 25 July 2020 12:26 (four years ago) link
seriously. also "indigenous triplet poets"... take this shit back to 1996 please
― rob, Saturday, 25 July 2020 12:31 (four years ago) link
Just to be clear, too, I never said that my preferences and predilections of yore made me superior to Harry Potter fans. In fact, I pretty explicitly said that HP just wasn't my thing, then attempted to explain myself as a youth.
Mookie, if you took that as some sort of hipster act of dunking or mockery, I'm sorry that sincerity is lost in you
― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Saturday, 25 July 2020 12:48 (four years ago) link
table your post was pretty clear to me, i don't know where the hell mookie got the reading they got of that post
― Kate (rushomancy), Saturday, 25 July 2020 13:13 (four years ago) link
Is indigenous triplet poets = one-legged Lithuanian dance troupes? If so yeah that can fuck off
― Rishi don’t lose my voucher (wins), Saturday, 25 July 2020 13:27 (four years ago) link
This is ilx. I thought we were allowed to be hipsters here.
― treeship., Saturday, 25 July 2020 13:29 (four years ago) link
Holy shit some of you are so young (and/or I am so old). Anyway, I totally read those Xanth books, I'd be afraid to so much as look at their covers these days.
― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 25 July 2020 13:33 (four years ago) link
(s)muggles have got it coming
― rumpy riser (ogmor), Saturday, 25 July 2020 13:38 (four years ago) link
I vaguely remember reading the first three or four Xanth books, but I liked a different Anthony book, On A Pale Horse, a lot better.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Saturday, 25 July 2020 14:38 (four years ago) link
same as imago, born in 87 and lost interest after the fourth one. i recognized at the time that they weren't very good books, but they were entertaining until they weren't. i'd read just about anything during my staying-at-dad's no-friend summers
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Saturday, 25 July 2020 15:59 (four years ago) link
i'd read just about anything during my staying-at-dad's no-friend summers
haha yeah ... the time filling function that these large books filled -- that was me and the Lord of the Rings books. It was the original binge-watching ...
― sarahell, Saturday, 25 July 2020 18:29 (four years ago) link
y'all had it so much easier than me, i grew up on the fucking bobbsey twins books
― Kate (rushomancy), Saturday, 25 July 2020 18:42 (four years ago) link
It was the original binge-watching
It felt healthier somehow when I read The Lord of the Rings and even The Silmarillion for the first time, whereas with The Wheel of Time I remember thinking (probably around vol. 7): 'why the fuck am I inflicting this upon myself? And why do I want it to go on forever?' I think I quit after Winter's Heart, probably because I was 17 when the next volume dropped and by that time I had put away childish things (right).
― pomenitul, Saturday, 25 July 2020 18:42 (four years ago) link
I had a babysitter as a child who'd had sons, so there were a shit-ton of old Hardy Boys and Tom Swift paperbacks still sitting around. I devoured those things.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Saturday, 25 July 2020 18:43 (four years ago) link
Heh, I read so much Trixie Belden between ages seven and ten.
At one point I found a Bobbsey Twins book lying around my grandparents' cabin and I swear to God, the plot was that their uncle had gone off sailing with a teenage boy he wasn't related to (referred to as his "boy friend") and now they'd disappeared? So the entire Bobbsey family got on a boat and went off looking for them on deserted islands??? Do you remember this one?
― Lily Dale, Saturday, 25 July 2020 19:00 (four years ago) link
a lot of my reading material came from the public library in the small town where i grew up and I read so much Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie
― sarahell, Saturday, 25 July 2020 19:03 (four years ago) link