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Harry Potter + other JK Rowling


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He did occlumency training, which was a disaster and he walked out of. Or Snape threw him out. Bit of both I think. 

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Snaps threw him out of training because Harry read his mind and learned something embarrassing about Snape (& James Potter) when he was a teen at Hogwarts.

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At any rate, the training was offered, and I assume that Dumbledore had something to do with that. Not his fault Harry hates Snape.

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I thought he'd be taught to fight though, not just to protect his mind. That only seemed to be offered because Dumbles thought Harry was going to be possessed. 

 

Has anyone read any Potterlock? There seems to be a lot of it around but it just doesn't appeal to me. 

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I've read some. The best ones (based on my interests) have the Sherlock crew as students/professors (depending on age) and not much crossover with the potter characters. There have also been 1 or 2 where Sherlock's family is related to the Weasleys or Sherlock is from that world but prefers the world of the muggles. Those I find less out of character than some of the Sherlock fanfics that aren't crossovers.

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  • 8 months later...

So this guy claims that Sherlock isn't really a mystery series and says that Harry Potter is:

 

 

 

 

Do any of you agree with him?

 

Personally I think the first few episodes were mystery stories but starting from The Reichenbach Fall, the series started devolving into what we have in The Final Problem which is barely a mystery in my eyes.

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Well, according to Moftiss "It's a show about a detective, not a detective show." So that part seems like a fair assessment. I don't know much about Harry Potter, but it didn't impress me as a mystery either.

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I think Irene delivered the meta description of the show: "I like detective stories. And detectives." Sherlock is a story about a detective, as Arcadia said, not a mystery show.

 

I thought the first few Harry Potter books functioned as young adult mysteries before the main plot was unearthed.  What I think is most fun is to read the whole series completely ignoring Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and just read it as Snape's story.  It becomes very poignant for me when I do that.

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I think Irene delivered the meta description of the show: "I like detective stories. And detectives." Sherlock is a story about a detective, as Arcadia said, not a mystery show.

 

I thought the first few Harry Potter books functioned as young adult mysteries before the main plot was unearthed.  What I think is most fun is to read the whole series completely ignoring Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and just read it as Snape's story.  It becomes very poignant for me when I do that.

 

Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle named his exploits of Sherlock Holmes 'Adventures'.  These are the adventures of a detective and his sidekick, not procedurals or classical mysteries all the way through.  I'd say the first season hewed closest to a mystery show . .and then it morphed into the Adventures of Superhero Detective Sherlock.

 

I will commit sacrilege, no doubt, as a children's librarian, when I confess to no particular liking for the Harry Potter universe, verging somewhat into animosity.  I like it in parts . . the Hogwarts faculty is the reason to invest,  in my opinion (of course, I'm a teacher by training and avocation, so I'm biased).  The kids tend to bore me.  I will have to try reading as Snape's story and maybe that will help.  To be perfectly frank, I have not been able to get through more than the first book, though I have watched 5 of the films.  I am conversant in Potter-speak, but J.K.'s prose does not hold my interest.  There, I've said it.

 

David Marcum, my occasional correspondent and Sherlockian Sensei, has tried no less than three times to get J.K. Rowling to agree to write an introduction for his MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (David is  hard at work as I type editing Vols. 9 and 10 in his ongoing series from 2015 - . ) He'd be even more tickled if Joanne would condescend to write him a Holmes pastiche, but so far, she (and her people) have resolutely blown him off.  While I acknowledge that there is a supernatural/Gothic mystery element to some of the Potterverse, and J.K. is a Scot from Edinburgh, birthplace of ACD--to me, these are tenuous connections at best to qualify her as a Sherlockian.  She has given little if any indication at all that her interests lie anywhere in that area.  She's undoubtedly famous and would boost sales if her name appeared in any of these volumes, but David has had, shall we say, a frigid reception to his entreaty.  J.K. obviously feels herself far above his little labor of love, and the independent little press that puts it out.

 

S*d her, I told him . . not in those exact words, but I counseled him that it was time to lay aside that particular quest and concentrate on authors who would be more receptive (and more grateful) to be asked to contribute.  David is a huge Harry Potter fan.  I don't know where the man finds the time for all his obsessions, I really don't. 

 

I am not a Potter fan, but I do love Snape.  (RIP, sweet Alan . . the world is a poorer place without you in it.)

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I will commit sacrilege, no doubt, as a children's librarian, when I confess to no particular liking for the Harry Potter universe, verging somewhat into animosity.  I like it in parts . . the Hogwarts faculty is the reason to invest,  in my opinion (of course, I'm a teacher by training and avocation, so I'm biased).  The kids tend to bore me.  I will have to try reading as Snape's story and maybe that will help.  To be perfectly frank, I have not been able to get through more than the first book, though I have watched 5 of the films.  I am conversant in Potter-speak, but J.K.'s prose does not hold my interest.  There, I've said it.

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(Sorry, Potter fans! Just a matter of taste, honest!)

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What I think is most fun is to read the whole series completely ignoring Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and just read it as Snape's story.  It becomes very poignant for me when I do that.

 

He's certainly my favorite character.

 

------

"Here's the answers.  See -- I'm smart."  :giggle:  That's pretty accurate for the most part, I think.  Trying to think what Sherlock episodes actually function as mysteries (according to the video's definition).  Hounds might qualify, since the clues are there, even though they aren't necessarily all wrapped up tidily at the end.  I can't offhand think of any others.

 

I agree that the Potter stories are fairly heavy on mystery elements, though I'd hesitate to classify them as mysteries per se.  For one thing, they've got a lot of character development going on as well.

 

I think the video overlooks the fact that there's more than one type of mystery story.  The type that he's talking about is the Ellery Queen / Murder She Wrote type, a puzzle that the alert and knowledgeable reader/viewer will know the solution just before the detective announces it.  Then there's the Perry Mason / Columbo type, where the audience learns who dunnit and how right at the beginning, and the real story is how the detective figures it out and gathers the evidence.  I suppose we could call the first type a mystery story and the second type a detective story -- even though most people seem to use the two terms interchangeably, and even though there are probably other types as well.

 

By the way, the name Rowling rhymes with "bowling" rather than with "howling."

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I think if I'd encountered them when I was ... well, Harry's age ... and not already conversant with a million other fantasy novels, I would have loved them.

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I think if I'd encountered them when I was ... well, Harry's age ... and not already conversant with a million other fantasy novels, I would have loved them.

 

I feel the same, Arcadia.  Coming to Harry Potter as an adult was never going to be the same.  When the first book was published in the States In 1998, I was taking a college children's literature course, and though HPatSS was not on the syllabus, my prof had waxed enthusiastic about it and said it was a must-read, and even organized some of the students into a voluntary Potter book club.  I bought a copy of the book and read it eventually.  Took two years to do so and by then I was working in a library so it had become something of a job requirement.  I thought it was sweet and the setting of Hogwarts was inventive, but it bothered me that J.K. was being feted around the globe as though she had invented something entirely fresh and new, never before seen in the world.

 

Not.  The genre of the schoolboy wizard/or otherwise exceptional child, girl or boy has been around for ages.  Does anybody else recall the picture books by Patricia Coombs about Dorrie, the little witch?  There were a whole series of them.  Dorrie = a student witch at witch school with all the other little witches and some benign (or not) teachers in the art of witchcraft. Hum.  J.K. is the same age as me so those must have rung a bell.  Then there is the classic YA fantasy quartet A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin whose chief protagonist is Ged, a pubescent trainee wizard who is sent to school to learn the Arts at the hand of his mentor wizard.  The very same year J.K.'s first opus was published The Craft was a boffo hit at the American box office, about a group of high school girls who think they are (or maybe actually are?) witches and have their own little High School Coven Confidential.  I did not see it because I thought it'd be really bad.

 

J.K. climbed aboard the Zeitgeist at a very auspicious time, but she has not done anything particularly exceptional or original.  I recall a court case dragging on for some years in which a gentleman in the U.K. who had written a series of graphic novels featuring a 'Larry Potter", a schoolboy wizard who was a dead ringer for Harry, sued Rowling for copyright infringement insisting that his work had appeared a year or more before her first book.  It seems impossible to believe that someone did not copy someone else, so similar are they, but I think in the end the court was not convinced that the gentleman's claim was genuine.  The timeline was hard to prove with finality, and by that time, J.K. had enough money to hire a cadre of the very best legal talent in the United Kingdom, and her adversary did not . . his little project had been self-published, if it was published officially at all.

 

What is exceptional about Joanne's books is the fact that kids couldn't wait to read them.  J.K. singlehandedly made carting around a 500-page book at school cool, and I attribute the current trend in thicker and thicker books for kids to the Rowling effect.   20 years on (oh, my God--can it be?) they are still continually in circulation as a new generation of readers discovers them.  These are the children of the original readers, y'all . .if you are over 40 and that makes you feel decrepit as it does me.  The mania is at a much lower simmer . . .while I still get asked for the Harry Potter books on average once or twice a day, it's not 20 times an hour like back in the heyday.  The money train rolls along  . . they are reissuing all the series in deluxe illustrated hardcover editions, similar to treatments given to other children's classics like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh.  Our departmental mascot Dobby (a gift from Walmart when they were done with the launch of the Chamber of Secrets DVD) still stands guard over the Potter collection and gives bad kids the gimlet eye.  I like the characters in theory, but when I try to read a page of Rowling's writing I'm like "People really can plow through this?!"  The kids love it, and, while I don't hold Joanne up as a model of outstanding prose style, at least she does use words, lots of them, and not just pictures like Captain Underpants.  Ursula LeGuin she ain't, as far as being an elegant writer, but her characters have certainly become indelible.  A former colleague was Crazy for Harry and he organized at least two gigantic Potter extravaganzas for families that required all staff on deck to help man the event.  We dressed up and all.  So I really have had my fill of Harry, even though I've dodged reading most of it.

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Yep, pretty much same-same for me. I respect her achievement but don't find much in her books to suit me. And it's all about me, of course. :p

 

I'm glad you mentioned LeGuin because it was her other great fantasy novel, A Wrinkle in Time, that really got me excited about books. They can mystify you, and make you think! Who knew? It was a far cry from the little homilies that made up most of the children's fiction aimed my way. Not that those weren't sometimes fun, but Wrinkle just blew my mind. Looking forward to the movie, the previews look good.

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Well, there you go, then. As I said, it's all a matter of taste! I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (the book) but everyone else I know found it a huge snore. I wish they'd show the TV version here in the States, but I'd probably be the only one watching it. :(

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Yep, pretty much same-same for me. I respect her achievement but don't find much in her books to suit me. And it's all about me, of course. :P

 

I'm glad you mentioned LeGuin because it was her other great fantasy novel, A Wrinkle in Time, that really got me excited about books. They can mystify you, and make you think! Who knew? It was a far cry from the little homilies that made up most of the children's fiction aimed my way. Not that those weren't sometimes fun, but Wrinkle just blew my mind. Looking forward to the movie, the previews look good.

 

A Wrinkle in Time was actually written by Madeleine L'Engle, but the two names are so similar, it's easy to get them confused.  I almost mentioned L'Engle in my last post as a forerunner of Rowling . . her kids are witches and warlocks per se, but they do have exceptional powers.  Besides the Wrinkle in Time series, she also wrote one about a family called the Austins.  I loved A Ring of Endless Light because it featured dolphins, and the main teenage protagonist Vickie, seems to be able to communicate with them.  That beats playing Quiddich on a broom, in my opinion.

 

LeGuin's works are High Fantasy as opposed to sci-fi.  They read very similar to the LOTR world, without the Orcs and stuff.  Also they are a very manageable length.

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OMG, I'm so embarrassed. :blush: Of course they're two different people! I can't believe I did that! EEb3W8g.gif
 
I liked the Earthsea series too, but I was a good deal older when I encountered them, so they didn't have quite the same impact on me as Wrinkle. LeGuin is -- was -- an extraordinarily good writer, I thought, though I didn't always understand what she was getting at. But she wrote beautiful prose.

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