Posts Tagged Harry Potter

According to One Of My Favorite People, Neil Gaiman, this week is the ALA’s Banned Books Week.  This is the week where the American Library Association speaks out against censorship in libraries and schools and encourages readers to pick up and read one of the frequently banned books.

The ALA has adopted Ellen Hopkins’s wonderful anti-censorship poem as its manifesto:

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,
innocents ripe for corruption
by perversion or sorcery on the page.
But sticks and stones do break
bones, and ignorance is no armor.
You do not speak for me,
and will not deny my kids magic
in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,
the red, white and blue corroded
by terrorists, socialists, the sexually
confused. But we are a vast quilt
of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered
identities. You cannot speak for those
whose ancestors braved
different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,
the living word eroded by Muhammed
and Darwin and Magdalene.
But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven
and earth designed intelligence.
Surely you dare not speak
for the father, who opens
his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.

So, in favor of my favorite constitutional amendment, and in support of Banned books week, I thought I’d offer up a list of my favorite commonly banned books.  I’d like to encourage all of you to pick up one of these to read.  They’re all wonderful, and they make you do that thing that book banning advocates most fear: Think.

• 1984 by George Orwell: The ultimate argument against government censorship, information control, and surveillance, this is the portrait of a world where even a person’s thoughts can get him in trouble. Usually banned by governments who practice what the novel argues against.
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume: I am honestly of the opinion that this should be required reading for young teenage girls, for the very reasons it’s often censored. It deals frankly with the traumas of the onset of female puberty – like periods, self-image with a changing body, and boys. (Five Judy Blume’s books are on the list of most banned books – and I don’t know how I’d have managed to make it through my pre-teen years without them.)
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson: This book won the Newbery Medal in 1978, and is one of my favorite books from childhood.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway:  Hemingway is another frequent visitor to the banned books pile, largely due to language and violence, but his books are, across the board, some of the best American fiction ever written.
• Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling: Frequently banned, and rejected for a Presidential Medal during the Bush administration, because it contains, *gasp* Magic, Witches, and Wizards, these are some of my favorite novels, and something that can get kids to read a 600+ page book is never a bad thing.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: I’m a huge fan of Vonnegut. This book has been subject to censorship due to profanity, but it’s a wonderful read, and the best of Vonnegut’s books.
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle:  Another of those books which has both won the Newbery Medal and been banned from schools and libraries due to mentions of witches and crystal balls (which are not actual witches or crystal balls, but scientists and scientific instruments) and a challenge to religious beliefs. This is a wonderful sci-fi novel along the same lines as Dune, but geared toward pre-adolescent and adolescent audiences.

So go join the librarians and be subversive, pick up one of these banned books (or one of the many, many others) and enjoy a bit of forbidden entertainment and enlightenment.

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I’ve been a fan of Cassandra Clare since before she was a bestselling author.  I first came across her writing in the most humble of locations – a Harry Potter fanfiction community.  Her Draco Dormiens trilogy, a retelling of the Harry Potter series from Draco’s perspective, is one of those incredibly rare, amazing things you almost never find: Good, well-written, novel-length fanfiction that keeps the spirit of the original characters intact.

Unfortunately, Draco Dormiens is nearly impossible to find now, since a cease-and-desist order forced its removal from the internet.

I had heard, through that same fanfiction community, that she had been working on an original novel and had found a publisher.  Here was someone who had managed the fanficcer’s greatest dream – a book of her own on store shelves.

Knowing the quality of her writing, I was unsurprised to find out that it had made it to the NYT Bestselling list. I didn’t actually pick it up until after the third book, City of Glass, had come out, though, mostly due to my own failure to keep up with what was happening with them.

At first glance, I was a bit disappointed, as the books looked to be Twilight clones, and Twilight had read as badly written, Mary Sue filled, fanfiction.

The Mortal Instruments series might deal with the same general genre as Twilight, but it is that genre in the hands of a good writer. Believe me, as a long time lover of vampires, a good writer makes all the difference.  They aren’t the best or most original books I’ve ever read, the subject matter is clichè, especially at this point in time when the marketplace is absolutely flooded with vampire stories.

What sets these novels apart, not just from the other vampire stories glutting the marketplace now, but also from most adolescent and young adult fiction currently in publication, are the issues that Clare deals with in her books.  There are no weak women in this series – indeed, the women are generally the most strong-willed of the characters, whether for good or for ill. No matter what side of the fence the women sit on, they are almost uniformly strong, intelligent, and opinionated.

She writes, extremely frankly, about homosexuality.  One of the central characters is gay, and the world of the Nephilim (demon-hunters) that he must exist in is even more oppressive against homosexuality than our own.  There’s also an issue of incestuous attraction between the two main protagonists who, like Luke and Leia, find out that they are siblings only after their first kiss.  (Gays and incestuous thoughts in a YA novel, Clare, you are a brave one!)

Clare is not above making jokes about the tropes and clichès of the genre, either.  At a party filled with “Underworlders”, the heroine wonders about how there are only beautiful vampires, never any ugly ones.  She gives easter-eggs and tongue-in-cheek references to the geek community where she found her start, and with an insider’s sense of humor.  World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and Naruto mangas make appearances throughout the novels, bringing the world of the books more fully into this one.  These books are written by a geek for other geeks, but you wouldn’t have to be a geek to enjoy them.

Definitely a fun read – I made it through the first two books in the space of a week, and the third was only delayed because I was having trouble getting my hands on it.  I’m anxiously awaiting the fourth.  They are unashamedly pulp, and if you don’t get into vampires and werewolves and demons, you probably wouldn’t get into these, but if you can set aside your post-Twilight disgust for a moment or two, you can have a good bit of fun reading them.

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Finally got to see Half-blood Prince this weekend, and it was extremely good.  I’ve said before that HBP is my favorite of the Harry Potter novels, and this movie has a really good chance of being my favorite of the movies.

Like the books, the movies are growing progressively darker and more mature as the characters grow older and the situation more dire. This is not and cannot be an uplifting family film, simply because of its place in the extended storyline.  B made the comment that this is the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter franchise, and I have to agree.  This is also the coming-of-age book and movie of the series, where Harry the child steps up and becomes Harry the man and Harry the soldier.  This is the first time we hear him say “I am the chosen one” with the full knowledge of what that could mean for himself and those he loves.

For those of you who have not read the book or seen the movie yet, I will warn that the following will contain spoilers:

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The new Harry Potter Movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince promises a lot of Snape being Snape in it.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but HBP is my favorite of the Harry Potter books, partially because it gave so much insight into one of the most puzzling and interesting characters in the books.

When you first meet Snape in the books, he’s a vindictive, cruel bully of a professor, a terror to students. It’s made pretty clear that there is absolutely nothing to like about him, and yet…I did like him, just as I found myself liking the more difficult professors I had in school.  He was clearly an extraordinarily intelligent character, the best at what he did, and what he did was one of the most difficult and precise things taught in Hogwarts, something that resembled chemistry more than it did magic.

He does not suffer fools gladly, our Snape.  I could appreciate that, because neither do I.

As the series progressed, you began to see more and more about Snape to explain his behavior toward students, his favoritism, his bias against houses other than his own.  His status as a double-agent was clear early on in the books and though I always hoped he was in it for the right side, you could never really be sure if he was a villain or a hero, no matter how many times he stepped in and saved Harry.

He kept away from others and did everything he could do to keep them from wanting to get close to him.  Other people could not, or would not, try to understand him or befriend him, and after a lifetime of that he had become adept at keeping them away.  His bristly exterior screamed “I don’t want friends, go away!”

Half-Blood Prince explained why.  He was as much an outcast as an adult as he was as a child, and after a lifetime of everyone else treating him horribly and pushing him away he turned around and started to push back.  The bullied became the bully, but it never got him acceptance.  Even doing what alienated teenagers do and grasping at the first thing that made him feel like he belonged – becoming a death-eater – did not work. He was as much an outcast among that group as he was among everyone else.

Snape is an enigma, a puzzle. He does horrible things, and yet seems to have some innate morality and conviction that though he may have to do horrible things, he is doing them for the right reasons.  He is potentially one of the most complex characters in the series.

I do love puzzles.

But that is why I’ve always felt like, especially after all that we see of Snape in Half-Blood Prince, the treatment of him in the final book of the series was overly simplistic.  It seemed to take an intriguing, complex character and reduce him to the lowest-common-denominator, taking the easy way out.  He died a hero, yes, but a hero reduced to two-dimensions.

But even so, I still consider Snape my favorite character in the series, and I am really looking forward to seeing the new movie.

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