100 Books #123 - Diane Duane's SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD

Oh man, it's a good thing a certain someone who talked me into reading Harry Potter this year didn't show these to me until long after I'd done with Hogwarts, because Potter & co. would have suffered even more by comparison with these than they already did with the Greats.

As I found myself explaining to a work colleague who is trying to get her 13-year-old son to read more, among the many reasons Duane's Young Wizards books look to be better than Potter is that their would-be wizards are teaching themselves (with a lot of help from the natural world, which is all quite magical if you're just paying attention) instead of slaving over, e.g., potions in a student cauldron in a dreary classroom for a grade. I like the way Duane has conveyed the pleasures of learning and discovery rather than making the learning process seem like a dreary chore, a set of hoops the impatient student must jump through in order to get to do the cool stuff.

I also like the way Duane has situated magic in the world of Young Wizards. It's got a slight Jedi/Force feel to it in that the practice of magic is one of the things that keeps the universe working (the idea that humanity/intelligent life is the universe's consciousness trying to understand itself is a subtle theme), but in a very reasoned and scientific, rather than a mystical, way. Magic slows down entropy, if it's practiced by the right kind of people, by which is meant people who care enough to make the effort even if it costs them everything. And thus the universe can be safeguarded.

Magic, in this world, then, is a calling rather than a privilege, a practice to be undertaken alongside of, rather than instead of, the rest of one's life in the world. Which means there's no elitism to it, no us versus them mentality, despite the secrecy.*

That's not to say it's not quite a lot of satisfying fun for our two young heroes in this first novel, Nita and Kit. Both of them are nerdy little outcasts with a bent for book-learning (the scene in which Nita comes across this first novel's titular textbook is one every bookworm will recognize, a bit ruefully) and a need to exercise their talents, but of course that means both of them are ostracized according to their lights: the rather passive Kit is a wallflower, the more aggressive and active Nita gets beaten up a lot. But lest this start to sound like a magical Revenge of the Nerds, Nita is more interested in harnessing her budding powers to protect herself from damage and recover a treasured space pen than in tit for tat. And soon, when her spell to recover said pen brings a fascinatingly strange new presence into her and Kit's lives, she's got much more interesting stuff to think about than getting back at some bullies. Like getting to know the trees, especially the rowan tree she's been climbing in her whole young life, who tells her of how the trees have always been watching over and protecting humanity, since they were just another primate screaming in the branches -- and why humanity is worth protecting.

Too, this book does the best job of any I've seen since Fritz Lieber's Our Lady of Darkness of fulfilling the promise inherent in that oft misused genre name, urban fantasy. Here as in the Lieber, we get a true magic of cities, in a radiant and lively good aspect as well as in a creepy and malevolent evil one. And, rarity of rarities, the good aspect is every bit as interesting and vividly imagined and engaging as the evil -- and that's saying a lot, because the foe Nita and Kit and their white hole pal Fred (!) take on is quite possibly the most genuinely heartbreaking and terrifying dark lord I've encountered at least since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy -- and this being-or-nonbeing, the Starsnuffer, let me say, licks Voldemort and Sauron hollow, as his world is way more interesting and scary than Mordor could ever hope to be. The fire hydrants alone!

And so again I find myself asking, just as I did in my prior post, why the hell isn't this book more famous? Seriously, kids, check this stuff out. Diane Duane is amazevaries.

*I want to make a comparison. If Harry Potter is Big Bang Theory, with muggles standing in for nerds as the class to be either mocked/attacked or protected, but hardly ever respected in their own right (even as it pretends to be a sop to those nerds reading), then Young Wizards is Community.

100 Books #58 - J. K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

Without having seen them yet, mind, I can certainly see why the powers that be decided that this book needed to be divided into two films.

It's really two different books sort of awkwardly pasted together, an opposite number to the awkward cleaving of George R.R. Martin's last two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Only one of them is good, though. Rowling saved the best for last.

To get to the good stuff, though, much must be endured. The training wheels are finally off for Harry, Ron and Hermione (and presumably for everyone else as well, but we don't get to see that), and they sort of wobble around for rather a shockingly long time before anything interesting is allowed to happen (apart from more contrived back-story exposition. I still say I'd rather have read the previous generation's adventures first-hand than watched their kids traipse around the countryside collecting bits of the story second- or third-hand). It was perhaps a daring thing for Dame Judith to have tried, to show what it would be like in the real world (if the real world had Magic Wands and Beaded Clutches of Holding and swords being distributed in farcical aquatic ceremonies) to have a responsibility to save it without the first clue as to how; to be sent on a treasure hunt without a map and no idea what the clues might be. Daring but dull; as has so often been the case* lots of really interesting stuff is happening elsewhere and to people I like better, but it's all Trio, all the time, for most of the first half of Deathly Hallows. The other really interesting stuff all gets related after the fact, in infodumps, second hand.

Ah, me.

But then there's the second half. And the second half is a bit glorious. Once the plot brings everyone back together again, the author can't help but let us see what's going on with everyone we've come to enjoy, not just the Wonderful Weasley Twins and the rest of their lovable family, but Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood (and her dad!) and all the Quidditch jocks and nutty professors and what's left of the Order, all mixing it up together and against the enemy together at last! We got a tiny taste of this at the end of Order of the Phoenix, but just a taste. This time we get one of Hagrid's giant pewter tankards full. Smack your lips and say "ah."

Pretty satisfying. Even if there's a bit of a Battlestar Galactica-esque turd near the very end. Well, not quite that bad. But still. Cough.**

After seven books and a good two weeks and change of immersion in the world of Harry Potter, I'm pretty much equal parts wistful to see it end and relieved to move on to something else, which pretty much reflects how I've felt throughout these thousands of pages -- about equal parts cheering and tooth-gnashing. I am grateful, at any rate, that Dame Judith managed to wrap things up well and to send the Hogwarts crew off into the (unwritten) future with some style and leave me with a cheer instead of a jeer.

So, I shan't completely dismiss Hogwarts as a silly Camelot place among young adult books. Were I recommending some neato books to some fresh young readers, Harry Potter might well make the list -- if the kid really nags me for a long one, but these still, for my money, rank well after the Oz books (even the "non-canonical" ones), the Chronicles of Narnia, the Chronicles of Prydain (which are, I think, underappreciated these days, perhaps? I certainly don't see them mentioned much, but I loved them as a young'un and still love them), His Dark Materials, or The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.

Speaking of which, hey, it's June 23. I gotta motor if I'm gonna make that Unexpected Party.

*Cough. Barty Crouch Jr. not even being introduced until the end of Goblet of Fire. Cough. Draco's dastardly deeds all being detailed only second hand at the end of Half-Blood Prince, Scooby-Doo style. Cough.

**And also, the Snape resolution. Cough. Because really? Seriously? Remusly? If you were madly in love with a kid's mother since you were both little kids, would you really have a big hate-on for her son just because she married someone you hated? The stuff with Snape and Dumbledore I buy and found kind of cool but the being in love with Lily all his life? Pure, badly mixed retcon. ARGH.

100 Books #57 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

People I trust on matters Potter told me I'd like this one a lot better than, say, the last two Harrys, those people were right. Well, mostly.

I am, though, getting some Potter fatigue.

So while I'm delighted to see Fred and George running their joke shop and to start off a book from the Muggle Prime Minister's point of view and all the other charming little humorous nuggets* that make a Potter book a Potter book, there are some other things that I don't find quite so charming. By which I mean, things that threaten the willing suspension of disbelief that is vital to the enjoyment of books such as these. By which I mean, well, consarn it, after five books and how many encounters with the bad stuff again, mightn't one reasonably expect that when the boy with the Dark Lord-detecting scar right on his forehead says something might be fishy, someone might at least be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and check it out? Even if it's just one of his classmates?

But no. Here's another plot that depends largely on Harry's being right and nobody with authority believing him until it's too late. Sigh.

Also, I'm seriously missing a certain character whose name I'll not disclose to avoid spoilers even though I'm pretty sure I'm the last person in the world to read these books. Portrayed magnificently, if sparingly** by Gary Oldman in the films. Sob.

BUT, I can forgive a lot of this because of the inventiveness of this book's big plot MacGuffin: the advanced potions textbook, via which a long-ago titular "prince" communicates with Harry and which satisfies a longing I've had since the first book: for a look at the creative process behind all of these spells and recipes these kids have been struggling to master and memorize for hundreds of pages. There was a glimpse of that in the Weasley Twins' gags, but that was just a tease. Of course.

The mystery behind who made all of those margin notes that have turned Harry from a potions duffer to a potions superstar is the most intriguing one so far. Who was it? What became of that person? What were his or her motives? Is there any relationship to a certain other book that caused all kinds of ruckus in the second novel?*** This is the most original bit of plotting Rowling has done -- which is a good thing because otherwise, this book is a bit dismal, even dull. The other main plot (or what should have been the other main plot instead of the tedious All About Voldemort exposition) involving a student who was obviously originally intended to be a serious rival for Harry at the school but who had degenerated into a bit of hum-drum caricature a long time ago, finally seeming to rise to the status of actual villain, fell a bit flat for me, mostly because it was sidelined by the romantic escapades of the Main Trio. I feel a bit cheated by this; that whole story is told second-hand at the end, Scooby-Doo style. I would rather have read that story than about teenage soap opera romance, even with magic wands.

Do members of Rowling's intended audience really prefer will-they-won't they to werewolf attacks and kid wizards trying to become eeeevil?

The main surprise of the book, which defines this one for most people I am sure, was spoiled for me long ago, of course, but was still moving. Even if it hadn't been spoiled for me, I expected it in any case; in the Hero's Journey, he always loses his mentor before his greatest challenge. I was, though, mercifully still in the dark as to how this loss was going to happen, so it still managed to be a bit of an enjoyable shock, even though the betrayal had been pretty much foreshadowed for five books already.

So now the decks are cleared, the furniture stowed, the cutlasses out, the drums pounding, the powder and shot lined up by the cannons -- and the crew arguing with Captain Harry about whether he can really sail the ship alone, especially since he doesn't have a course to go with his mission. Bring on Deathly Hallows.

*Some of which might not be intentional? I'm still looking at about page 110 when Ron and Harry buy a large bag of owl nuts. Um.

**There is not enough Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman should be in all the films.

***But the answer turned out to be kind of nonsensical. An early candidate for the real identity of the Half-Blood Prince was ruled out based on the timing of the book's publication, but then the actual prince turned out to be someone pretty much the same age as the eliminated candidate. Um.

100 Books #56 - J. K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX

Well! This one certainly started off with a lot of drama. And shouting. There was a whole lot of shouting going on. But of course we all came through it; it was just an excuse to delay the Return to Hogwarts for about 200 pages, and to make sure everyone still feels nice and sorry for poor, persecuted Harry.

Alas, the brattiness continues at Hogwarts, as everyone starts freaking out over a series of exams on which many future opportunities depend, Ron and Hermione continue bickering in that cute pre-couple way, and Harry seems to be having one long shouty temper tantrum.* Yes, being a teenager sucks, even if you can do magic. Especially if your two best friends now have AUTHORITAH!**

Amusing as Prefect Ron and Prefect Hermione are, though, their antics are not the main show. No, the main plot of this one, as far as I can tell, is that the Ministry of Magic is in denial about the return of the evil wizard and is suppressing all discourse about it while simultaneously infiltrating Hogwarts and trying to turn it into a school that is all theory and no practice and no fun at all -- i.e., a wizard diploma factory. This is potentially a very interesting development, and just possibly a very smart critique of the decline of education in the Western World into the "weigh the calf but never feed it" model, but of course here that's all more or less dismissable as another front in the War on Poor Harry.

Were I of a mind to re-read these some day (currently I am not, but one never knows), I wonder what it would be like to read them as a story of a mentally divergent boy who gets upset whenever confronted with the fact that he's not a special wizard boy at all and hallucinates a lot while wandering around in bunny slippers. I now picture Ralph Fiennes in the Madeline Stowe role. Hey, that might explain a lot of things, including Quidditch scoring!

...And I've almost talked myself into doing a re-read someday. This despite having two enormous books to go.

But then I'd have to deal with All the Adverbs again. Every writing critique, every style guide, every essay on good prose I've ever encountered has emphasized how sparingly (hee hee) these need to be used. I know it's largely a matter of choice, to use them or not to use them, and I originally wasn't going to say anything about this here, but after thousands of pages and now that I'm well over the Harry hump, I want to scream "Enough with the adverbs in your dialogue tags, Dame Rowling" (she said wearily). Popqueenie assures me I'm not the only one to be haunted by this awfulness. I want to put on a nun's habit and start rapping some knuckles now. Really, if your dialogue is good enough (and here's the thing -- it is! The dialogue is good and very expressive!), adding that nugatory bit of description in the tag is utterly unnecessary. Doing so just yanks me out of my happy reading trance. Argh!

I sound like I'm turning into a hater, but really I'm not. As I observed above, the dialogue is good and there are still plenty of imaginative touches, a trail of amusing and sometimes horrifying (the Quill of Detention!***) bread crumbs leading us to Rowling's/Voldemort's witchy cottage at the end. The Twins are still awesome (and their comic relief has never been so necessary) as are the ghosts. A lot of background/second tier characters get a chance to shine (Neville!). And even Hermione gets a funny line or two. Well, "Europa's covered in ice, not mice" made me giggle, anyway...

And sometimes, just sometimes, Dame Rowling actually displays some lovely writing chops:

October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces.

Isn't that nice? By far that is some of her best weather writing to date. And there is plenty to which to compare it, yes there is. Of course it's meant as foreshadowing as much as anything; the later tone of the book takes a decided turn for the dark and forbidding, a turn that comes as a bit of a relief, it's been built up for so long: all that tension and fear feels like it's finally going to pay off somehow. However, this brings up, I'm afraid, another gripe.

Here's the thing. As with the other books, Order of the Phoenix is, at bottom, a mystery. As mystery plots, though, the Harry Potter books are fundamentally unsatisfying, because part of the fun of reading a mystery is trying to solve it right along side the detectives. And to a degree this is possible in Harry Potter, but only to a degree: one can sometimes get an idea of who did/is doing it**** and maybe why, but almost never how. Or some other faulty combination of those three classics. And a lot of this has to do with Rowling's system of magic, the workings -- and, more importantly, the limitations -- of which are never really disclosed to us. So as we read along, of course we get lots of rather obvious red herring characters to hate and suspect (but they almost always turn out to be secretly lovely, don't they?), which is moderately fun, but after four or five books we know it's never one of these that's (deliberately) doing Voldemort's dirty work, so the fun of suspecting them is pretty hollow, and it does no good to read deeper if the villain du jour has not even been mentioned yet, or if we don't know how something is happening in any more detail than "by magic." Anything is possible if you are a wizard, want something to happen, and can invent a vaguely Latin-sounding word for it, apparently? Yeah, we get a neat and tidy explanation for all of the malefactions at book's end, always, but it's almost never something we could have anticipated, no matter how closely we've been reading -- I guess because we're meant to just passively take it in as poor, dumb Muggles, rather than actively trying to figure stuff out as we go along.

A bit shaggy dog-ish, that.

But I'll say this for Dame Rowling, she's a hell of a lot better than certain screenwriterly types at resolving plots. At least her Chekov's gun looks like a gun and fires like a gun; Prometheus employed Chekov's shoelace and forced it to try to drown a pistachio.

So there's that.

On to The Half-Blood Prince, which sources tell me is as good as, perhaps even better than, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which I think has been my favorite so far.

*And yes, he is provoked. Rowling loves to torture this guy. It's not enough that he has to fight the most evil wizard ever, every book; every book he also has to be majorly misunderstood, abused, set to impossible tasks, threatened with expulsion, and loaded with too much homework. And this book is no exception and is the worst yet, because the evil wizard understands the power of the press and has managed to convince everyone that Harry is a self-aggrandizing liar and his protectors are all senile or crazy. I'd probably get shouty, too. I'm not sure I'd subject readers of my chronicles to such a minute, blow-by-blow account of every single blow-out, at such great length. Sigh. This one almost lost me, you guys. It was only my multitudes of friends who love these books cheering me on to the better books (6 and 7) that kept me struggling through all the screaming matches of the first third of this volume.

**Many were the moments when I could not help but laugh at my mental image of Hermione in aviator shades whaling on people with a nightstick and yelling "RESPECT MA AUTHORITAH"

***Seriously, Remusly, how does Harry not wind up with complete anemia by the end of this book? Yeeouch!

****Goblet of Fire, I'm looking at you. We readers hadn't even known of the episode-villain (as in, not Voldemort, but his tool-of-the-year)'s existence until we were mostly through the book. He was pretty much just dropped in at the end as a spindle around which to wrap the plot threads. Boo!

100 Books #55 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

Well, that was certainly a whole lot of Quidditch. Even more than I was expecting. And that was, what, only the first 20% of the book?

And a whole lot of other stuff as well. I hesitate to use the term "bloat" here, but... wait a minute, no I don't! It's like someone gave this book a whole pocketful of the Weasley Twins' Ton-Tongue Toffees all at once! There are more sub-plots in this one volume than there have been in the rest put together, and not too many of them resolve at all well. House-Elf uprising, I'm looking at you.

But it's fun to see the kids as budding teenagers, Ron and Harry finally noticing that Hermione's a girl and all. I'm sure the hormones will only get worse as we continue onwards. Teenage melodrama, now with hexes. That could really, really be fun, if it doesn't get bogged down with a lot of other stuff.

I get the impression, sometimes, that the author was actually way more interested in Harry's parents' generation than Harry's own, though. How else to explain the mountains of backstory/exposition that we get each novel (none more than here, so far. Pensieve, anyone?)? Everything that happens seems to be traced back to something the previous generation made or did. It's kind of like living in the shadow of the Baby Boomers, which, OMG J.K. Rowling is a Boomer isn't she? Are these books all just coded messages to the rest of us that we'll never be as cool as the Boomers were and we should stop trying and just sit back and say thank you sir and ma'am for being so awesome and may I polish your shoes with my hair again like a good little House Elf?

But no. Writers don't do that, do they?

Let me just say, though, that the House Elf thing really, really bugs me. I mean, sure, Doctor Who has the Ood, but at least the Ood don't feel compelled to punish themselves whenever they make mistakes. And, when freed, they go on to become pretty freaking awesome. Rowling insists on leaving them toiling in the kitchens and insists that they like it that way. This coupled with all the other elitist elements (wizards are better than non-wizards, the latter denigrated as "Muggles"; pure-blooded wizards are better than half-bloods or Muggle-borns who can do magic, the last denigrated as "Mudbloods"; the Houses at Hogwarts, Gryffindor=popular kids, jocks and cheerleaders and pretty girls who are also good students, Ravenclaw=braniacs, Hufflepuff=dorks, Slytherin=posh kids) gives these books an unusually unpleasant edge for me. And yes, I know, all the good guys (who are so very, very good, aren't they?) are Muggle-tolerant if not downright Muggle-fans, so no lectures about that, Potterites. I know. I'm still free to dislike the fictions that make this fictional tolerance necessary when said fictions often threaten to spoil my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

Of course, I risk going down a silly garden path (or, in this case, hedge maze) in reading too much into these books that are, after all, just meant as entertainments. But these elements keep cropping up and annoying me when I'm trying to enjoy all the funny and imaginative bits (current favorite character, well, right up there with the Weasley Twins: Peeves the Poltergeist. The one laugh-out-loud moment I had in Goblet of Fire was when he had to be extracted from a suit of armor that was enchanted to sing Christmas carols; Peeves was substituting his own rude lyrics). Fortunately, there are a lot of these; Rowling's at her best when she's just letting kids be silly kids and ghosts be silly ghosts.*

Goblet of Fire ended on notes of great foreboding even as most of the plots and subplots were resolved with happy endings. And so, while I do like these books best when they focus on pranks and surprises and childhood goofiness, I am curious to see what its like to see this milieu get darker. I know the main characters, that oh-so-perfect trio of Harry and Ron and Hermione, will be all heroic and face it all with courage and perfect goodness (even if they squabble a bit here and there) but what of everybody else? I so love everybody else.

Especially the Twins. And Neville Longbottom. And Severus Snape. And the wacky Weasley parents. And the giggling girls of Gryffindor. And the owls. I can see why there's been a bit of a mania for owls as pets, because Hedwig and Pigwidgeon are adorkable!

*And if magic were real, it would definitely never, ever be safe to accept candy from strangers. Tee hee!

100 Books #54 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

A number of small scuffles broke out in the corridors, culminating in a nasty incident in which a Gryffindor fourth year and a Slytherin sixth year ended up in the hospital wing with leeks sprouting out of their ears.

A lot of people have told me that this is their favorite, or at least one of their favorites, of the series, and I can definitely see why. Of the three I have read so far, this one has indeed been the best for sheer fun as well as for drama and tension: the mystery of Hermione's course load; the menacing presence of the Dementors; the tantalizing threat of Sirius Black; the sad story of Hagrid and his hippogriff; and, most amusingly and refreshingly, the first ever notes of skepticism as we're introduced to the "misty-voiced" Professor Trelawney's Divination class, which most students and many teachers seem to think is a lot of rubbish. Rowling is juggling a lot of balls in this one, and keeps them in the air most satisfactorily.

The structure of one school year per novel is starting to wear on me, though. I had resolved to read all of these in one long gulp, as I did, more or less, with A Song of Ice and Fire last year, but I'm starting to wonder if reading them this way is going to just give too much emphasis to the humdrum run of summer sucks/back to school/Halloween/Christmas/Easter/Final Exams and Quidditch Cup.

I keep going, though, because within that predictable framework, there is still a lot of amusement and charm to be had. Like the kids winding up in sickbay with leeks growing out of their ears. As far as I'm concerned, this is what J.K. Rowling does best: coming up with amusing little details like that to illustrate what life must be like among a hundred or so immature wizards, childish creatures with as-yet-unmeasured magical powers, kids being kids, but with wands and fake Latin and the possibility, at any time that someone might actually get turned into a toad. Or worse.

Which is to say that it remains true for me that the stuff going on along the sidelines of young Mr. Potter's adventures is way more interesting than the main events -- and while this particular volume was rather short on Weasley Twins and long on Hermione harrumph, it still had just enough in the way of entertaining little nuggets to keep me going, and leave me cracking into the next book, which, if I'm guessing right, is going to break from the school year tradition a bit, which makes me happy, but it also sounds likely to concern itself mostly with Quidditch, which does not. Um.

Well done.

100 Books #53 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS

It's the secondary and incidental characters that are really selling me on these books as I finish with the second of seven, especially the Weasley family, and especially the Weasley Twins. Intended, from what I can gather, as a sort of faded gentry in the wizard world -- "too little money and too little children" as the uni-dimensionally awful aristocrat brat Draco Malfoy mocks them -- the family is loving, clever and charming and the twins, the twins are more fun than any one boy ever could be alone, smart, resourceful, full of mischief and pranks, and utterly, utterly lovable. Meeting the rest of the family is easily the best part of this second Harry Potter novel, but there are lots of contenders for second best.

Such as the fact that Hermione spends a good chunk of the second half of the story turned to stone. I'm sorry, but she annoys the hell out of me. Such as Dobby the House Elf, who reminds me of Michael Palin's maniacally self-flagellating waiter in Monty Python's Indian Restaurant Sketch and whose attempts to save Harry Potter's life always wind up getting Harry into big trouble. Such as poor Moaning Myrtle. Such as Professor McGonnagle, whom Rowling simply has to have been picturing as Maggie Smith from the start, which makes her wonderful.

But then there's Professor Lockhart, the most cardboard yet of Rowling's nuisance characters. I'm sure I'm meant to cheer his fate at the end but I couldn't be arsed; I think this would have been a better book without him. And yes, I'm aware he's meant to be a warning of the dangers of Harry's maybe buying into his own celebrity too much, but Harry is just so very, very good that perils such as those are onionskin tigers at best. He's such a paragon, our Harry. I'd maybe seek to frame him for some malefaction or other myself.

I did enjoy the mystery plot, and all the behind-the-scenes wrangling and jockeying for power that it caused, though it's quite possible that George R.R. Martin has spoiled this kind of clash between capital G Good and capital E Evil characters for me, for good. I understand that these are young adult books and thus are supposed to be rather black and white affairs, but so far I'm not 100% sold on the idea that they're as enjoyable for adults as for children.

I bet I'd have loved them unreservedly as a teenybopper, had they existed then. Nonetheless, I will read on, out of curiosity and out of love for the second-tier cast. What are Fred and George going to scheme up next?

100 Books #52 - J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR'S STONE

Quibble time first. Why, oh why, did the powers that be insist on publishing this book with different titles in the U.K. and the U.S.? Are British children taught the finer points of alchemy at such an earlier age than American ones, that the former should be expected to know what the Philosopher's Stone was but the latter needed that patronizing little pat on the head about it.

Oh, and Quidditch. Foolish game. I can see where one needed to create a kind of Wizard Cricket for a tale of Wizard Boarding School, but did it have to be so grossly bizarre in its scoring? Anyway.

I can certainly see why certain fifth graders of my acquaintance, back in my substitute teaching/newslady days, were so very taken with this book that they played at being Harry and Ron and Hermione on the playground the way my own contemporaries (dating myself, of course) played at being Luke and Leia and Han. It's lovely to imagine that a child whose actual life is as neglected and deprived and dismal as every child who's ever not gotten his/her way always imagines his/her own life to be, is suddenly revealed to be the Most Important Kid, Like Ever and whisked away to become a great hero. Maybe that can be true for me, too. And I've decided to start calling that girl Hermione and chase her around the jungle gym and try to get her to kiss me.

I hurried to show said fifth graders where there was better stuff to be found in the library. And while there were not shelves and shelves of ready-made Halloween costumes and toys and companion picture books and other dreck to go with them (unless one wanted to hit eBay), these discerning kids mostly came to agree with me that those older books were pretty all right, too.

Is Harry Potter's world as charming as L. Frank Baum's Oz books, as gently edifying as C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, as erudite and overwhelming as J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth Madness, as dark and portentous as Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books? It is none of these. It is modern and a tad bland and predictable compared to its ancestors, obviously written with an eye toward screenplay adaptation, but enjoyable nonetheless. I'm told the books get more challenging as they pile up, the idea having been that the series' original readers would grow up right alongside the Hogwarthians, and so I'll keep on reading for a while.

Because, why not?

I've now popped my Harry Cherry, and an amusing experience it was. Alas that I had already seen the film version of this first book, so never got the chance to cast the characters in my own imagination, but I'm not good at that anyway, and Hollywood and its partners did a fine, fine job. Any book in which I get to imagine Alan Rickman skulking around my head for a few hours is fine with me. Skulk on, Snape.