Thank you! It’s been super disheartening to see people get excited about Harry Potter all over again, just as it was to see friends buy the video game a few years back. Many people who want to ostensibly call themselves allies are more than happy to engage in Nostalgia over Solidarity.
I read the Harry Potter books as a child. I enjoyed them a normal amount. I think I dressed up as HP for Halloween one year. But then I grew older and I “graduated” to other fantasy, as I would generally expect someone to do.
Now when I think about Harry Potter, I always think of Ursula K Le Guin’s comments:
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
I’ve been reading across her catalogue, interspersed with books from Isaac Asimov. I like both but the style is so different and Le Guin is just amazing at the cultural world building parts. Her books on the Ekumen and all the challenges at contacting a different culture, aside from language, are a fantastic read.
I actually got bored at the later Foundation books from Asimov where the main characters are so above everyone else in their abilities, its almost like a teenager wrote it. The first ones are really great though, up to the Gaia revelation.
Thank you! It’s been super disheartening to see people get excited about Harry Potter all over again, just as it was to see friends buy the video game a few years back. Many people who want to ostensibly call themselves allies are more than happy to engage in Nostalgia over Solidarity.
I read the Harry Potter books as a child. I enjoyed them a normal amount. I think I dressed up as HP for Halloween one year. But then I grew older and I “graduated” to other fantasy, as I would generally expect someone to do.
Now when I think about Harry Potter, I always think of Ursula K Le Guin’s comments:
Ursula K Le Guin is a great author! And as far as I understand, a pretty good person, too.
I’ve been reading across her catalogue, interspersed with books from Isaac Asimov. I like both but the style is so different and Le Guin is just amazing at the cultural world building parts. Her books on the Ekumen and all the challenges at contacting a different culture, aside from language, are a fantastic read.
I actually got bored at the later Foundation books from Asimov where the main characters are so above everyone else in their abilities, its almost like a teenager wrote it. The first ones are really great though, up to the Gaia revelation.
She was a philosopher who specialized in Daoism, and I like how she incorporated that into her worldbuilding
It feels like that’s not really a big ask…
Yeah but this is 2026. People don’t read books anymore. So all they have is nostalgia for the one series they read as a kid.