Asking the Wrong Questions

In Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events , three children--Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire--are orphaned by a mysterious fire, and subsequently plunged into an intricate mystery. Over the course of thirteen books they investigate their dead parents' history, the organizations they belonged to and fought against, the friendships, enmities, and love affairs they witnessed or were embroiled in, and the secrets they kept and revealed. Throughout their journey, the Baudelaires encounter many adults--guardians, friends, and acquaintances--some of whom are sinister, but most of whom are simply benevolent yet incompetent, too caught up in simple, one-sentence life philosophies such as 'He who hesitates is lost!' to be much more than hindrances, although they do teach the children about the existence of complexity and shades of gray. At the end of the series, the Baudelaires arrive at something like an adulthood, through the discovery that they have been subsumed i...

Seven years after the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , and a good four or five years since he first described the general gist of its plot, Michael Chabon is finally about to publish another (adult) novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union , due this May. To tide us over that last stretch of Chabon-less months, however, the New York Times is serializing another new novel by Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road . And, in other highly-anticipated-book news, J.K. Rowling.com reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published on July 21st. Time to make that Amazon order. UPDATE: More good news: season 2 of Life on Mars begins on February 13th .

Speaking in New York this week, J.K. Rowling put an end to several burning fandom discussions (is Dumbledore really dead, is Snape really evil, a broad hint about whether Harry is going to survive the series--click through at your own risk). I'm not remotely surprised by any of her responses, but I am surprised that the usually close-lipped Rowling has suddenly decided to spill the beans on so many contentious issues. To be perfectly honest, I wish she'd kept mum. It's one thing to feel certain that a story will unfold in a certain way, and another to know that it will because the author told you. The former allows the reader to maintain a frisson of suspense, whereas the latter takes something away from the reading experience. On the other hand, maybe Rowling is just as tired as I am of some of the more inane Potter -related speculation that's been floating around lately (Rowling should kill Harry because children need to learn about death is a recent personal f...

Those of you with LJ accounts may have noticed the increasing references, this past week, to Charlotte Lennox's (an assumed name) The Ms. Scribe Story: An Unauthorized Fandom Biography . If you've passed on reading this riveting, meticulously researched and extremely well-written account of lies, cruelty and manipulation within Harry Potter fandom because you're not a fan of the series or involved with that particular community, I urge you to give it another look. Lennox's document isn't simply an account of one fandom's descent into madness. It is a vital study of group behavior, and of how the online medium accelerates and exacerbates (but by no means causes) the worst impulses of those groups. If you've ever been a member of an online community, no matter how diffuse and ill-defined, if you've ever given any thought to the ways in which the internet redefines the communal experience, you owe it to yourself to read this document. This is too obscu...

Note: The first part of this post is a reworked and much-rewritten version of an article I wrote for the discussion group Harry Potter for Grownups in the fall of 2003, not long after the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix . The second part is a mass of ideas that have been swimming around in my head since I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince six months ago. The generational parallel bomb exploded within Harry Potter fandom with the publication of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , which for the first time took a closer look at, and exposed the juvenile escapades of, the parent generation--specifically James Potter and his three friends, the Marauders, and their fraught relationship with Snape. Fans expanded on the comparisons that the book draws between Harry and his father, and used them to conclude a one-to-one relationship between James' generation and Harry's. As Harry's impulsive best friend, Ron was cast in the role of Sirius,...

First things first: unlike many fans of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, I've never found the books' film versions to be terrifically important. I've seen all four, but I can't imagine going out of my way to do so, or even renting them on DVD if they hadn't come to a nearby movie theatre (in fact, I suspect that in most cases I saw the films primarily because I wanted to be able to discuss them intelligently). I wouldn't be heartbroken to hear that no new films were being made, and the endless discussions of whether or not the kids playing Harry, Ron and Hermione are going to stick around for the rest of the series are of absolutely no interest to me. I am honestly baffled by the fact that a Harry Potter news site like The Leaky Cauldron should report on the doings of every actor and cast member even remotely connected to the films, and I've watched the site's transformation, over the last few months, into the Goblet of Fire film site with exa...

Madame Trelawney, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Hogwarts, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Hogwarts Headmaster, (Those are bezoars that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Fleur, the Lady of the Wands, The lady of embarassing situations. Here is the woman with pink hair, and here the Owl, And here is the one-eyed auror, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries in his flask, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Dark Lord. Fear death by fanfic. I see crowds of people, walking round in the Floo. Thank you. If you see dear Minister Fudge, Tell him I bring the prophecy myself: One must be so careful these days. (Via Making Light )

Joining the likes of A.S. Byatt, Jack Markowitz, and Robert McCrum is The Scotsman 's Brian Hennigan. Hennigan, an anthropologist whose field of expertise is pop-culture, sums up his exhaustive study, in which he interviewed hundreds of adult Harry Potter fans, and concludes... No, wait, I'm sorry. Hennigan gets pissed off at being asked stupid questions when he reveals that he's from Scotland (specifically, does he know J.K. Rowling)*, and launches into a diatribe against adult HP fans, who are, he concludes, losers. He goes on to say "There was not anything of entertainment value [in the HP book Hennigan read] for a fully-developed adult mind. I am sure that one or two adults read Harry Potter books in the same distracted way that soap operas are observed or crisps are munched - in a manner entirely consistent with the obliteration of whatever dreary day they have just got through and in search of some temporary relief from the trauma of an unjust world. MAYBE ...

In the comments to my previous entry on HBP, Dan Hemmens wrote: I'm mildly irritated by the Is-He-Or-Isn't-He with Snape. "Is Snape Evil?" was a fine plotline for book 1, but it's been done. As you point out yourself, if he does turn out to be evil, it destroys his entire character, so you wind up with a "mystery" that only really has one possible resolution. He's right, of course. The only satisfying resolution to Snape's character arc would be for us to discover, at some point in book 7, that he is indeed on the good guys' side (even if he isn't much of a good guy himself). This doesn't reassure me, however. Satisfaction demanded, after all, that Sirius Black would survive the series, live to see his name cleared, and make peace with Snape. For all the series' predictability, Rowling hasn't impressed me as having too much concern for her readers' satisfaction, or their comfort. It's a cliché by now to talk about how...

Assume spoilers ahead. Probably my favorite book of the series, which isn't surprising when you consider that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Se crets was my previous favorite and probably for the same reasons. Although I enjoyed the previous two volumes, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix , they felt underedited and unfocused, and Half-Blood Prince is a welcome return to form. Writing about Alfonso Cuaron's version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, blogger Andrew Rilstone wrote that the story JK Rowling "really wants to tell is the one about the schooldays of the previous generation: Pettigrew and Riddle and Harry's parents and Voldemort's rise to power. Harry is only the lens through which we see this history take shape." I disagreed with him at the time, feeling that an important part of the coming of age story is the hero discovering and understanding his past (remember what I said before about the detective novel being an empowe...

For the last few days, I've been engaged in an odd three-part discussion on three different weblogs. Edward Champion started it by suggesting 18 Fantasy Authors to Read Instead of J.K. Rowling and then Gwenda Bond suggested 18 others . Matt Cheney kept the whole thing going by wondering what books you'd recommend to someone who'd liked Potter and wanted more of the same. Ed and Gwenda's lists are interesting. Of the 40 authors mentioned (Ed added 4 more to his list), I've read books by 20. Two I think should be threatened with a sledgehammer to the thumbs should they ever look at a writing implement again (there's another one I might have said the same about, but she's already dead). Another three are authors of frothy but insignificant work who, while they may be, on a sentence-by-sentence level, better writers than J.K. Rowling, haven't produced anything on the caliber of the Potter books. Two others are excellent and highly talented authors whose b...