From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 10:31:14 MDT
On Monday, September 04, 2000 8:53 PM John Clark jonkc@worldnet.att.net
wrote:
> Ok, maybe I'm a victim of all the hype or maybe I just have the mentality
> of a ten year old but I really don't think the colossal success of the
Harry Potter
> books is a fluke. They're very well crafted, exciting, and the most
enjoyable pure
> fantasy books I ever read. The last one might be a bit too violent and
scary if your
> children are very young however.
I've heard many good things about the series from adults who have read them.
I've also heard lots of bad things from adults who haven't read them. I
tend to think the latter get too uptight. Yeah, I do see kids getting
wrapped up in Harry Potter, but so what? Kids (and adults) get wrapped up
in all sorts of things, from _Star Trek_ to the latest top forty band. I
wonder what those who criticize the Potter books want? Kids to only get
into things they got into when they were young?
No doubt, some of it is religious resistence -- Christian fundamentalists
trying to satve off any competition to their belief system. That's one
reason a lot of the same crowd was against Dungeons and Dragons back in the
1970s -- it trivialized religion and choices of belief system by making them
into a game.
Anyhow, I'm not and never was a big fantasy reader anyway... But I do have
some favorites in this genre (fantasy), including Poul Anderson's _Operation
Chaos_, Peter S. Beagle's _The Last Unicorn_, and Lord Dunsany's _King of
Elfland's Daughter_. I wonder if anyone else has similar tastes.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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