"We lived on love and books."

This interview with Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and other famous novels and stories,  is enchanting and inspiring. He was truly a remarkable man. My second favorite quote (that was too long to use as the title for this post) is: "I am going to make a t-shirt. It is going to say: 'Stand on the edge of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.'" If they ever make that shirt, I will be sure to buy it.

7 Reasons Why You Need to Read the Harry Potter Series (*cough* for my sisters)

1. The magic. It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is something charming and delightful about the idea of magic. Rowling does it complete justice – it is never overly simplistic, it is never too easy, and it is always incredibly brilliant. I know some of you are refusing to read it because magic isn’t real; that is utter nonsense. Clearly you have forgotten that decades ago, most of our current technology would have been considered “magical,” and there is still a lot in the world that can’t be explained. So if you believe in any unproven scientific hypothesis, then by extension, you have to believe in magic. You don’t really have an option.

2. It is a national bestseller ten times over. If you haven’t read it yet, you are probably part of the 1% that hasn’t. Don’t be part of the 1%. Yes, I am shamelessly using peer pressure as an argument. Mainly because if you read 50 Shades of Gray – “just to see what all the hype was about” – then you can read Harry Potter.

3. Life is awful. Really awful sometimes. I can’t understand people who only like reading books about reality: death, war, despair, lust, and greed – and no happy endings. Take a break every once in awhile. The awfulness will still be there, waiting, once you’ve finished the book. Besides, doesn’t your brain EVER get tired of thinking? Go on a mental vacation into the world of wizards and witches. It is so much cheaper than any staycation – just think how jealous your friends will be when you say you spent a weekend at Hogwarts and they only went to the zoo and the movie theater. I know you are an adult. I know that hippogriffs don’t exist; there is no need to be snobby about it. Hippogriffs can make your life better rather they are real or not.

4. Rowling is funny. Chuckling-to-yourself-out-loud-in-the-coffee-shop kind of funny.

5. Surprising applicability. That’s right, you heard me. The topics, events, and ideas in Harry Potter are actually surprisingly applicable to our world (otherwise known as the wasteland of cold, hard reality). If anyone has told you that these books are all about important ideas such as love and friendship, they are correct, but those topics are not quite as startlingly applicable. Rowling’s discussion of death and grief is incredibly intense, accurate, insightful, and comforting. The parts of the story that I find most powerful are those that deal with the awfulness of the world – death, corruption, evil, selfishness. (Now hold on, you mutter, I thought reading these books would help me escape from these awful truths. Well, I was getting to that…) But through all of these difficult topics, Rowling always manages to give us hope. Hope that great sacrifices can make a difference, hope that death is not the end.

6. Rowling does an excellent job with character development, and not just with the major characters. Anything else I say here will sound cliché (“it’s like the characters are real – like they are your friends – like they are 3D – like everyone else already used up all the words in the world to talk about well-developed characters and they didn’t save any for me”). So I will leave it at that.

7. World building. The details about the wizarding world are perfect – the smaller the detail, the more delightful it is. From butterbeer to quidditch, from the pamphlets released to the public about protecting your home from Death Eaters to the completely amusing jumble of departments that make up the Ministry of Magic, these glimpses into this alternate universe are one of my favorite parts of reading these books.

Appreciating Voice: The lost art of subtlety

I think I might be living my life backwards. When I was younger, I read the classics: Dickens, Lewis, Tolkien, Collins, Austen. When I went to college I read Faulkner, Hemingway, Morrison, and Shakespeare. I didn’t start reading Harry Potter until I was around 20 and in the last few years I started reading Young Adult books. So I’m definitely regressing.

There is nothing exactly wrong with Young Adult (YA) literature, except that, not surprisingly, I am discovering that I’m too old for it. In this statement I exclude the Harry Potter series because that is one of the most well-crafted beautiful stories of our time. But the rest of the books that cater to the dystopian/fantasy craze that is sweeping the nation are disappointingly lacking. Just the other day I picked up a book that a friend had recommended and I couldn’t even get through the first chapter. It wasn’t that I could tell this was the same story I’d read in every other YA book – as discussed in an earlier blog post, no one really writes new stories – it was something else. There was something missing that wasn’t missing from Rowling’s books. 

So naturally I went back and began rereading the series. While reading, I came across a section that lifted the veil ever so slightly and it was as though I could see Rowling at her desk writing, and chuckling as she did so at the witty words she was penning. (I know she probably uses a computer, but when I picture authors, they are always handwriting the story, usually with a quill and dressed like they are from the 19^th century for some reason.) This happened often when I was reading Dickens as a child. I’m pretty sure the image below was burned into my brain long before I ever actually saw it:

Credit: Google Images

You see, what these YA popular fiction books are missing is voice. Not just those delightful moments where the author can get away with commenting almost directly to the reader, but in general. I know that voice varies depending on point-of-view and a number of other things, and I’m not trying to argue that every author should insert their authorial presence all over the book. I am arguing that stories need a voice (narrative, authorial, anything) like my dog needs food in the morning: without it they are dead.

Since I’ve been reading these rather dull tales crafted for today’s youth, I have realized that there is nothing like the voice of Dickens filling the space after the cruel and unjust act of a character with a rant against the social evils of his day. It is like the chorus of a song, heightening the tension and unifying the reader, the writer, and the characters.

And there is nothing quite like Rowling’s quiet voice asserting that “it is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow time down, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up” (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 317).

So this is what was missing and I think I know why. 

I had one of the best classes of students last year that I think I am ever likely to have; often, while trudging through Julius Caesar, my students would be sitting with brows furrowed, trying to decipher the language (they were honors students, so I’m not making this up, they really were trying). Shakespeare is a very funny man, so sometimes I would read a line and pause, waiting for them to chuckle. Silence. “It’s a joke guys. It’s ok, you can laugh.” They would look up confused. I’d explain it to them. A rather lame attempt at a laugh would circulate briefly and we’d continue. I don’t blame them in the slightest for not understanding Shakespeare, but I do blame them for missing the humor in easier pieces. I blame them for missing the subtle humor often layered in the tone of a sentence. Because there is a grave result from the fact that much of the younger generations don’t read: they’ve lost the art of subtlety. They are used to everything being violently overt, thanks to sitcoms, televisions, and movies. And with that loss of the understanding of subtlety goes the voice of authors everywhere as they write novels that cater to the youth of today.

I don’t believe that every author should always launch into rants about the state of the world or constantly lift the veil to wink at their reader. But I do think that every author needs a well developed voice that is grounded in the subtleties of tone, that supports their narrative, and, quite frankly, makes their book worth reading. 

Then again, maybe we just need to add laugh tracks to books.