There are many books that Miss Edith hears about, and she gets all worked up – nearly can’t sit still until pub date arrives and the book can fall into her sweaty little hands.
None of the Harry Potter titles have fallen into this category.
So don’t ask me if I’m excited about the new Harry Potter. I truly, truly, do not care. I read the first one a few years back and was bored to tears.
(I’m the child who didn’t like Narnia, either. I slept through the Star Wars movies my mother dragged me to as a child – yes, Miss Edith was once a child, though there is a legend that tells of her being hatched at the age of 14, holding an amber cigarette holder – and I’ve never read a word of Tolkien. Not a fan of “magic realism,” either, by and large. (There are a couple of exceptions to this, but I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head.) I like my fiction to be about real people I can identify with. And if that makes me small-minded, or limited, so be it. I never claimed to have catholic tastes.)
I felt bad because one of these kids’ fantasy book series that actually didn’t horrify me to my core recently led me to try to read a book for which I had moderately high expectations that were dashed on the rocks like so many clamshells dropped by seagulls on the Cape Cod coast. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of all those books about the Baudelaire tykes, published a novel entitled Adverbs. I actually enjoyed the first of the Baudelaire books when I read it a ways back. I didn’t read Adverbs when it first came out, but I noticed it at the library recently so I thought, “Oh what the hell” and took it out.
The fact that I didn’t open it within three hours of borrowing it was a bad sign, to be sure. But I eventually did open it, and I read the first 50 or so pages. Today I intend to return it, unfinished, and I intend to not waste any guilty energy on that subject. I think it’s actually an accomplishment of sorts that I’ve reached a point where I can get rid of an unread book without feeling bad about it. Why should I spend time reading things I don’t want to read? I’m not in school. I have free will. I can re-read Paul Rudnick’s I’ll Take It over and over again – and do – and will choose that piece of clever fluff, any day, over Daniel Handler.
I did read Handler’s novel of opera and incest, Watch Your Mouth I believe it’s called, and wondered vaguely why this wasn’t a more recognized cult novel. But maybe I was thinking about it too hard. All I can say is, if you have no interest in Adverbs, don’t feel bad, but if you liked the Lemony Snicket books but want to go further with it, try Watch Your Mouth. Even if you don’t love it, at least it’s short. And there are no sequels.
Has anyone ever pondered how books with too many sequels might be sort of a bad idea? Like movies with too many sequels? This brings me to one grand literary exception I’d make to this proposal: the works of Eric Kraft, which are all marvelous in their own way. But Mr. Kraft is a subject for another day. In the meantime, I suggest that someone start work on a dissertation doing a close contextual comparison of the Harry Potter books and movies to the oeuvre of Sylvester Stallone.
Miss Edith thanks you for your time.
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1 comment:
Just so you know, even though I am a self confessed fantasy fan . . .I never got into the Narnia books either. The only one I finished was the Horse & His Boy . . .and that was because of the horse element (from the time I learned to read, I've read anything/everything I could get my hands on with a horse theme). I didn't realize the whole Christian motif Lewis imbued into the series, so it wasn't part of my anti-Christian initiative. I guess it was more of an instinctive aversion.
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