Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

fucking around on ipad synth apps

Meant to approximate the sound of Adolf Hitler in art school iirc.

oh pol potter -- i had such high hopes 4 u

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.

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.

sarahell, that sounds like a Norma Klein novel.

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)

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!

I kinda don't want to know what these books actually were ... I am more content with my vague memories.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Nerd, not need camp

couldn’t bring myself to read them, but I listened to the whole series as audiobooks

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.

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

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)

Like I wrote a book report on the Chuck D biography in 8th grade and had my own zine.

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

oh damn son here it goes 🍿 🍿 🍿

thank god S-zy hasn't posted ITT or shit would be getting really real

the movie that was directed by Alfonso Cuaron holds up pretty well IIRC

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’.

Fuck you mookie. Amazing that just sharing about one's life can be derided so easily.

uh mookie i'm not particularly sure why table's post inspired such an incredibly hostile response from you

seriously. also "indigenous triplet poets"... take this shit back to 1996 please

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

table your post was pretty clear to me, i don't know where the hell mookie got the reading they got of that post

Is indigenous triplet poets = one-legged Lithuanian dance troupes? If so yeah that can fuck off

This is ilx. I thought we were allowed to be hipsters here.

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.

(s)muggles have got it coming

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.

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

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 ...

y'all had it so much easier than me, i grew up on the fucking bobbsey twins books

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).

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.

y'all had it so much easier than me, i grew up on the fucking bobbsey twins books

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?

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

I read a ton of Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels, probably lucky that never crossed over into Tom Clancy.

Where my James Clavell and Graham Greene kids at?
Also Robert R McCammon (completely unknown these days i think!) and a shitton of L Ron Hubbard's sci-fi.

I only remember reading Raise the Titanic!, but I might have read another Cussler book at some point.

Somebody who rented my grandmother's house at the Jersey Shore left behind a copy of Brian Garfield's Wild Times, which was pretty much the greatest book I'd ever read at age 12. (It's a Western - a fictionalized version of the life of a guy named Doc Carver, who was a competitor of Buffalo Bill, running his own Wild West show in the 1800s.)

Oh yeah, my dad suggested I read Shōgun when I was 12, and so I did.

all the talk about bobbsey twins is giving me flashbacks to my time cataloging an early 20th c YA collection, the sheer amount of them was astonishing. what didn't those rascals get up to

Where my James Clavell and Graham Greene kids at?

I did really like Our Man in Havana when I was a kid.

Best Christopher pike novel is the weird surreal pro life one where the ghost of an aborted baby sends everyone to slasher purgatory as revenge

love aborted babies!

I read Shogun as a kid and also read some multi-part L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi series that still has me wondering wtf it was all about.

Reading your post I felt an irrepressible need to put this on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpTUhN__FRk

such dulcet tones

all I remember about the books is that they were somewhat humorous and had a fair amount of graphic sex