In the past several weeks I’ve read the three fattest Harry Potter books, The Prizoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, and The Order of the Phoenix. In all three cases I read them in a matter of days (less than three), and I think in every case much faster than I read them the first time around.

It started after seeing the movie of The Prisoner of Azkaban and feeling a bit let down. It was a decent movie (much better than the other Potter flicks), but the story was just too complex for a two hour movie. So I reread the book to renew my appreciation for what has become my favorite Harry Potter book.

Continue reading Why I Like Harry Potter →

Slate on the explosion of child authors, including Christopher Paolini (wrote Eragon at 15), Flavia Bujor (The Prophecy of the Stones became a bestseller in France and Germany the year she turned 14) and the late Mattie Stepanek (five volumes of Heartsongs have sold half a million copies; he died at 13 from a rare form of muscular dystrophy).

The New York Times Magazine gives a long (7,000+ words) look at graphic novels (registration required). The piece ponders whether or not the graphic novel will replace the normal, word-based novel as the next great literary form, the way the novel replace poetry once upon a time. It’s a toss-up at this point, though their growing popularity — and floor space in major bookstores — is worth noticing.

McSweeney’s Quarterly even dedicated a recent issue to comics. (Comics? Comic books? Graphic novels? What’s the difference? Comics are typically the multipanel stories you’ll find in the newspaper. Comic books are typically multipanel stories stretched out into a small magazine. Graphic novels take the multipanel story and stretch it into a novel. That’s my horribly inadequate definition, though there’s a lot of overlap. The issue of McSweeney’s is edited by graphic novelist Chris Ware and features many other graphic novelists.)

In what shouldn’t come as a surprise, there’s been a drop in the number of Americans reading. In the past ten years there’s been a 4 percent drop in Americans who read any book at all (from 61% to 57%) and a 7 percent drop in Americans who read literature (from 54% to 47%, and literature was defined as poems, plays and narrative fiction).

The National Endowment for the Arts is calling it shocking, but it seems surprising the numbers aren’t worse. With the rise of the Internet, video games, Tivo, the growing prominence of movies and an ever-shrinking attention span, it’s a wonder Americans read at all. Not even Oprah or Harry Potter can save us now.

Semisonic’s Jacob Slichter released a memoir earlier this week about the real life of a rock star, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star?: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other Tales from a Drummer’s Life.

The 65 pages I read while enjoying the air conditioning of Barnes & Noble were witty and self-effacing, showing a guy who liked the dream of being a rock star more than actually being one. The overly self-conscious description of the band’s first photo shoot was hilarious. If it wasn’t a brutal $21.95 I would have bought it on the spot.

Nevermind. I did finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night. I stayed up until 1:00 a.m. to pull it off (more proof of what happens when Abby’s not around). In my defense I’d reached the final climactic chapters, and once you get that far there’s no turning back.

Interestingly enough, this morning I read the announcement about the title for not-yet-written sixth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. No release date has been set yet, so I can imagine we’ll have to wait at least a year.

As I finished The Goblet of Fire last night my head was spinning with thoughts and ideas about the world of Harry Potter. The Goblet of Fire is very much the Empire Strikes Back of the series. The bad guy comes back for real, the good guys are thrown into disarray, everything’s up in the air. Certainly there are no ‘Harry, I am your father!’ revelations, but it’s a pretty dark ending that left fans dying for book five.

Personally, I like The Goblet of Fire and The Prisoner of Azkaban the best. The first two books seemed like lame attempts for the bad guy to come back. It works in book one, but it felt like a repeat in the second book. I like The Prisoner of Azkaban so much because the plot has such a twist and for once in the series it’s not this elaborate plot of Voldemort regaining power (though it certainly has elements of ‘Harry, I am your father’). It’s gutsy for a series to do a book without its main villain, and even cooler that the book came out so well.

I like The Goblet of Fire because it raises the stakes. It’s another wild plot full of twists and turns, and this time it’s not some half-baked plot of the bad guy coming back to psuedo-power. It’s the real deal.

Part of what I like about the Harry Potter books is that Rowling packs so much into them. Yeah, each book is even more ridiculously longer than the last one, but she’s not wasting time with unimportant ventures. Almost every detail comes up again later. Any spell, creature, potion or magical object mentioned in the early chapters is bound to come up again.

I also love some of the deeper themes in the books. There’s some of the obvious stuff about good vs. evil, love, sacrifice, friendship, etc., but I like some of the more complicated stuff as well. The Goblet of Fire hints at some of the methods for fighting evil. One such method was to fight evil with evil, to authorize the good guys to use deadly force against the bad guys, to do just about anything to ensure safety, though not necessarily justice. Contrast that with headmaster Dumbledore’s belief in the second chance. While the book was written before 9/11, it has interesting parallels to how we fight the war on terror.

And I also love that Harry’s just a teenager who likes a girl but can hardly talk to her, gets nervous tests and trials, and likes to avoid homework.

Coincidentally, the morning after I stay up re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, author J.K. Rowling announces the title of the upcoming sixth Harry Potter book in the seven book series: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Rowling is still in the process of writing the sixth book and no release date has been set.

The announcement was made on Rowling’s new flash-heavy web site, which includes plenty of fun extras for fans, including details that didn’t make it into the books (a deleted scenes for books?).

One of the nation’s top independent bookstores and a St. Paul landmark is closing. Ruminator Books, formally known as The Hungry Mind, will close its doors on July 25.

While I can make with all the sad talk, the real sad fact is I’ve only ever been inside Ruminator Books once. That was during an Oscar Hijuelos reading, which I attended for a college class and just so happened to turn me on to the Cuban-American writer.

Sadly, I’m much too cheap to enjoy a good independent bookstore. I prefer heavy discounts, even if it comes with dog-eared pages. The HarMar Barnes & Noble with its used section (one of only six in the country) is my favorite (where I scoff at paying more than $5 for a book). Maybe that’s a sad and stupid thing for a writer to favor, but that’s where I’m at. I just have such a hard time paying $16.99 for a new paperback.