Harry Potter and the Sleepless Nights

[denny]

This weeks burst of insomnia has at least meant that I had plenty of undisturbed time to read the first few Harry Potter books, which gothslut lent me last week after hearing that I still hadn't read any of them.

I'm mildly disappointed - although perfectly good books, and I wouldn't mind reading the rest if I can borrow them, I can't say that I'd bother buying them. I'm surprised because various people I know who have read them have given them such a glowing recommendation - I was expecting to be more impressed than I am.

I imagine I would have been a great deal more impressed with them when I was a kid - I think the plots and characters are just too simple to really captivate me now. Nothing wrong with them, but they've only left the kind of impression on me that a good TV show might do, rather than the deeper impression a really good book can leave on the mind...

Mind you, the third one was better than the first two, so maybe they pick up as they go on... there's certainly a fair few of them now if I remember rightly?

Comments

[mhw.livejournal.com]

Four, so far.

I agree. Really, they're just boarding-school stories with a bit of magic. However, they're accessible, and as long as you remember that they're really pitched at 8 to 11 year olds, they're not too disappointing. The shame is, really, that JKR isn't a tremendously good writer, and she wastes her characters like confetti. A whole school - and really only one viewpoint, that of the remarkably uninteresting HP. The rest of the characters get treated like supporting cast.

This has been jumbling around in my head for a while: why, given that I'm not enthralled by the books, do I so enjoy writing from the POV of George Weasley, a hardly sketched-in character? I think perhaps it may be that he is so vestigial in the books - with him, I have the chance to develop someone who might almost as well not have existed, and to give his character a decent, fleshed-out and interesting personality.