inulro | Bookstuff

No, not those reviews I've been promising.

I need to buy this when it becomes available here. Fortunately I have book tokens. If I had a smaller to-read pile, I'd have to import it from the States, but I'll wait.

I'm six months late, as usual, but I just discovered this response to the article A.S. Byatt wrote in the New York Times slamming adults who read Harry Potter. I heard about the article at the time, but I deliberately didn't read it because I knew it would piss me off, and Byatt has, after all, written one of my favourite books.

koimistress articulates things far more coherently than I could, and to top it off, in one of the comments, sums up exactly how I feel about the issue of female characters in LOTR:

while the maleness of it isn't a bar to my enjoyment, it does add to a one-sided feeling, that for me detracts a bit from the sense of a real world. Cool.

But back to the AS Byatt thing. Apparently, she thinks that adult Harry Potter readers are "people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." Uh-huh.

Now, imagine that my life hadn't got thrown off track and I was still a stuffy intellectual desperately seeking that elusive tenure-track appointment. I think I still would have read Harry Potter. I wonder how Byatt would reconcile a dead-language-reading, lost-language-reconstructing teacher of arcane religious references in Blake being a fan of Harry Potter to her world view. It's at times like this I wish I still led that life, so I could have sent her a scathing letter she couldn't ignore. As it is, she'd probably just point out that the fact that I read Harry Potter is a sign of just how much my brain has atrophied.

Byatt reminds me of all the so-called "serious" medieval scholars who thought I was less of a real academic than them because I put my talents towards reconstructing the northern European dark ages involving folklore and mythology and other pre-Christian ideas instead of studying Church history or Aquinas or something dull like that.