I found a new favorite show this year while House was busy being poorly written. This article, however, is not going to be about the show Breaking Bad. I am just stealing the title because I think that it’s cool. If I ever get around to talking about why the show is so awesome, I’ll put it under the title of “Oh Man, Harry Potter Sucks.” Because that is what we’re here to talk about today.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone is the first really bad book that I’ve read cover to cover in a great many years. Time has just been too scarce lately to put up with unfulfilling leisure reading. This time, however, was different. My son was smitten with the book, and would ask for it every night when we read together. I hold a secret hope that he just liked it because it took me so long to get through each chapter. Every minute I spent stumbling over the impossibly tongue tangling language, was another minute that he wasn’t in bed.
Still, I doubt that very much. It’s just the kind of book a kid would like. I probably would have liked it when I was his age. I liked worse things. I liked the Hardy Boys… Which I am trying to convince him to read with me now. Harry Potter fills the boyish desire for an easy sort of extraordinariness. His congenital magic abilities, and the special protective spells already cast over him have the same appeal of most of the superhero comics, only without all of the pretty pictures and post-pubescent characters.
I’m a traditionalist though. I prefer my fiction to fit the old fairy tale model: an ordinary character in an extraordinary situation. To me, The Man Who Was Thursday is the pinnacle of all make believe books. That’s not a fair comparison though. TMWWT is a grown-ups book. No matter how many grown-ups read HPATSS without the pretext of a young child at their side, it is still not a grown-ups book. As such, I would compare it to James And The Giant Peach. As far as kids books go, JATGP got everything right. It’s well written. The protagonist is perfect. It’s enjoyable from beginning to end. You might not think this comparison fair either though, because JATGP is an eminently smaller book. But HPATSS would have been roughly the same size if the author knew what a personal pronoun was.
I am going to humble myself for a moment here. I can barely read out loud. I don’t know why, but I sputter and stutter, and generally get things wrong when I try to say the words that I see on the page. I always have, and I guess that I always will. Imagine the fun of being in AP English in high school when you have a difficult time proving that you are functionally literate. HPATSS took me right back to those days. It’s as if the author was being paid by the letter. Some paragraphs had the words “Albus Dumbledore” written out five or more times. I took to shortening the sentences on the fly after only a couple chapters.
I’m not a great writer. Hell, I just admitted that I’m not even a good reader, but I know for damn sure that I am a better editor than whoever did the job for HPATSS. The phrasing and just general oddness of every sentence was painfully difficult for me to deal with. My son probably thinks that I’m illiterate now thanks to this book. Had I read the book to myself, I would probably not be so hard on this, but as it is now, I’m going to need to find a support group.
So much of the novel was just perfunctory. It reads like the author wrote it with ten minute breaks between each sentence. If anyone can recognize that trait, it’s me. That’s exactly how I write. I’ve never charged you anything more than time for my opinions though. And let’s be honest. You don’t read this for entertainment. You read Al for enlightenment. I try to make you laugh every once in a while, but even I never pretend to be worth a dime. The author of HPATSS is filthy rich off this stuff.
I’ll leave you with a few of the things that HPATSS did right. For one, I have to say that I did not guess much about the ending. Good for you, you very bad book… You pulled one over on me. Secondly, and more importantly, the book got the most important point of writing correct. A great fiction writer, Orson Card, once said that you should always write about the person who is in the most pain. The title character, is definitely the one in the most pain throughout the novel. I’ve actually read books that got this wrong before. They’re embarrassingly bad.
HPATSS isn’t nearly as bad as that. Oh, it’s bad. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. It’s just nowhere near the worst thing ever. It’s really more annoying than anything else. Had it been half the length and used a pronoun or two, I would be singing a different tune right now. Alas though, it wasn’t and I’m not.
Tags: Book Review
Perhaps this will finally persuade me to read James and the Giant Peach. I’m not sure how I missed it back in the day. Perhaps it was censored out by my mother. She had a tendency to be offended by some strange things (Robert Munsch, anyone?). But I hope your opinions never persuade me to become more critical of the mechanics of writing (unless it is my own). I have always been very easily entertained by books, but I have noticed that is changing, and I do not wish for my options to become too limited.
Obviously I like the new format. We’ll see how long you survive my inane commentary…