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Mak0rz posted:Ah it was water book 3, not 4. My mistake! I fuckin know right. Imagine being a little gradeschooler who likes reading the first 3 books then that loving brick comes out, God. I think having something in common with other kids at school is the only thing that kept me struggling through those books as long as I did
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Sep 14, 2020 18:31
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Chubby Henparty posted:The only bit I remember from the Hunt for Red October book is 'Jack Ryan came from big piles of old money and was, as everyone knows, therefore incorruptible' Jack Ryan's dad was a police detective, and Ryan bootstrapped himself up because he was a genius at the stock market. He married into old money, his wife was a surgeon who was able to hook him up with people to fix his back injury. Clancy was apparently unaware that even in his fantasies about beating the commies, his blue-collar hero was a success because of luck and connections rather than hard work.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:33
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Data Graham posted:Were the last two books in the series really exactly the same length? Whoa let's not get into a book measuring contest here.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:34
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Data Graham posted:Were the last two books in the series really exactly the same length? Nah, Deathly Hallows was longer than that chart says. My copy ends on page 759.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:40
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Dewgy posted:Nah, Deathly Hallows was longer than that chart says. My copy ends on page 759. You should see the large print edition!
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Sep 14, 2020 18:42
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Dewgy posted:Nah, Deathly Hallows was longer than that chart says. My copy ends on page 759. That's for the uk editions, the us editions have different (longer?)page counts, but i figured as long as all the books were of the same edition it got the point across (that jkr is and always has been a hack)
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Sep 14, 2020 18:45
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Sunswipe posted:Jack Ryan's dad was a police detective, and Ryan bootstrapped himself up because he was a genius at the stock market. He married into old money, his wife was a surgeon who was able to hook him up with people to fix his back injury. Clancy was apparently unaware that even in his fantasies about beating the commies, his blue-collar hero was a success because of luck and connections rather than hard work. Don't forget the almost illegal insider training (in Patriot Games, I think?) that he escaped by having the information published in some obscure newspaper.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:49
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Tom Clancy sucks and gets progressively worse, but at least he fills his books with somewhat educational material. Interested in how this potboiler is going to resolve? Too bad, here’s 50 pages of mr Clark’s rifle works part by part.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:50
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A friend decided to marathon all the Tom clancy books. He says they started going down hill with the end of the cold war and that 9-11 seemingly completely broke his brain
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Sep 14, 2020 18:53
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Skwirl posted:Out of context individual shots are a very terrible way to judge a film. Especially because I think there's a good chance the bits of "kids just acting upsettingly sexily adult" are uploaded either by pedophiles or by people intent on calling anyone who says anything nice about the movie a pedophile, and either group might have done their own editing even beyond just starting and stopping at certain time stamps. They were from reviews from Cannes, actually. I specifically went for reviews unrelated to the current controversy. I'm not agreeing with people saying the movie seems like a pedophile thing, I'm saying that I don't think I could watch several of the scenes in the movie because kids are acting upsettingly sexily adult. And that's the point of those scenes! That it's upsetting! I just find it hard to watch even done on purpose to show that it's bad with actresses that age.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:55
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We had to sexualize the children to save them from being sexualized.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:05
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Amazing that somehow Rowling's book is going to be a less-progressive version of Silence of the Lambs, where at least in the movie version it's explicitly pointed out that Bill isn't trans
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Sep 14, 2020 19:12
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Canned Panda posted:https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1305568192694288384?s=20 The guy on the right looks like CGI
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Sep 14, 2020 19:13
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Related to Rowling, the Shriekcast (HP reread podcast by and for people who liked HP at the time but stopped paying attention after the last book) introduced me to Emerson Spartz, founder of HP fansite Mugglenet, whose twitter is just endless galaxy brain nonsense: https://twitter.com/EmersonSpartz Pick and choose your favorites, I can feel my braincells dying with each one I read. https://twitter.com/EmersonSpartz/status/1235596941305597954
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Sep 14, 2020 19:58
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Soylent Pudding posted:A friend decided to marathon all the Tom clancy books. He says they started going down hill with the end of the cold war and that 9-11 seemingly completely broke his brain I'm slightly curious to read some of those. Last one I read was "The Bear and the Dragon" from 2000, which in paperback is over 1100 pages, and Jesus loving Christ did it need an editor. I never want to read the phrase "Japanese sausage" ever again.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:17
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I used to like all those Clancy books when I was a kid, but man have I aged well.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:21
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Procrastine posted:Related to Rowling, the Shriekcast (HP reread podcast by and for people who liked HP at the time but stopped paying attention after the last book) introduced me to Emerson Spartz, founder of HP fansite Mugglenet, whose twitter is just endless galaxy brain nonsense: Welcome to the least useful definitions of time travel and teleportation.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:37
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I can't remember a lot of stuff so I guess there is an evil wizard hanging out then and blocking me from time traveling.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:40
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Soylent Pudding posted:A friend decided to marathon all the Tom clancy books. He says they started going down hill with the end of the cold war and that 9-11 seemingly completely broke his brain I read all of them up to Teeth of the Tiger and yuuup. The Cold War ones are good to great spy/military thrillers if you're into that, then the USSR fell and it all went to poo poo. It is pretty hilarious how the post-9/11 ones have to retcon the 90s nonsense (Denver got nuked, Russia joined NATO, China fell to democracy, Iran killed Saddam and annexed Iraq...) though.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:50
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Procrastine posted:Related to Rowling, the Shriekcast (HP reread podcast by and for people who liked HP at the time but stopped paying attention after the last book) introduced me to Emerson Spartz, founder of HP fansite Mugglenet, whose twitter is just endless galaxy brain nonsense: The only real way of time travelling is staying up late at night during the Daylight savings switch (thank you for this tip, Pete and Pete). As for the JK Rowling stuff it's kind of sad. I had a friend who was non-binary and Harry Potter was their favourite thing in the world. They have several Harry Potter themed tattoos, listen to whatever the gently caress is Harry Potter inspired music and a bunch of other obsessed fan stuff (referring to people as muggles over and over again was particularly grating). I haven't spoke to them in a few years but I'm sure the whole situation is like a punch to the stomach for them.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:08
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Bismuth posted:As a kid i would read the first 3 HP books over and over, then I'd kind of slow down on goblet of fire and order of the penis, struggled my way through halfblood prince, and straight up couldnt finish deathly hallows. The more popular they got the worse the writing was. As a kid I didnt understand what was going on but i realized later that the more popular she got the less editing was happening, after all she was the genius author behind the first half of the books, so why not let her bloat them to 3x the length and make them impossible to read. Its sorta like george lucas, and many others. I'm going to tack against this increasingly common take. I reread the whole series around age 28 and that first book is absolutely tedious. It's a testament to just how interesting the world was that the books became the success they did, because the story of the Sorcerer's Stone is sooo dull. Book 2 is a little better and 3 and 4 are probably the best because Rowling's writing improves for each one. And that doesn't change for the last three. The good parts are still pretty good, but they're just that: parts. There's no editing to pull it all together so even if you feel like a given scene was well written it doesn't build on other scenes to come to a satisfying conclusion. The quality of the writing just rots away from there; you can tell the parts she'd probably already outlined and cared about (the Battle of Hogwarts, Neville's character arch) and the ones she'd just come up with to fit stuff together (Kretcher, the whole sword swap.) HP isn't all that lovely (compared to it's cohorts; it's not Proust.)There's a coherent narrative with themes that all builds to a reasonable conclusion, which is more than you can say about a lot of speculative fiction especially if you include self published stuff and fanfiction. In my opinion, Rowling is a really average writer who came up with an interesting world which prompted her success more than anything. It's no surprise her mundane mystery series are lovely; there's nothing interesting about the premise and I doubt Rowling does anything to hone her skills as a writer these days since those were already slipping during HP.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:08
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J.K. Rowling: And these guys are called the Jewblins. They manage all the money in the banks and are greedy and conniving. Editor: uhh are they supposed to be... like... goblins... J.K. Rolwing: Goblins?
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Sep 14, 2020 21:11
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for a fun and educational romp through the fraught nature of editorhood, check out the bestseller Foucault's Pendulum
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Sep 14, 2020 21:15
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I love Foucault's Pendulum. 
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Sep 14, 2020 21:21
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HP 1-4 were good fun books with a little bit of murder/mayhem but mostly school bullies and lovely teachers in a fantastical magical world. As soon as 5 hit and it became grimdark and much more serious I felt a noticeable drop in my interest.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:21
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oldpainless posted:HP 1-4 were good fun books with a little bit of murder/mayhem but mostly school bullies and lovely teachers in a fantastical magical world. As soon as 5 hit and it became grimdark and much more serious I felt a noticeable drop in my interest. I read the first Harry Potter book, just to see what all the fuss was about. It struck me as perfectly solid kid-lit, the sort of thing 10-year-old me would have really liked (even though I've always preferred spaceships-and-robots stuff to wizards-and-ghosts). I had heard that the books' writing level kind of "grew up" along with the main characters, and I was curious to see what that meant, but I never actually got around to reading the rest of the series. Was it just another example of mid-2000s media deciding that darker and grittier equals better? That's a little sad.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:40
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His Dark Materials is the better contemporary series. Also it has aged the best with its abiding message of attack and dethrone god.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:43
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Soylent Pudding posted:A friend decided to marathon all the Tom clancy books. He says they started going down hill with the end of the cold war and that 9-11 seemingly completely broke his brain I think that’s relatively accurate, but also he was being treated for the heart disease that later killed him in 2013 from about 2005 on, and I think the ghostwriters he got in to work up his books from outlines showed their hands. Plus he was busy being a super rich dude and doing super rich dude stuff like owning yachts and a baseball team.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:43
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I only ever saw the films, but it always amused me that there was this chosen child who could do no wrong, and had been involved in multiple incidents at the school where he was always right... and still in like book 6 or something nobody would believe him when he would say something bad is happening.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:49
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Powered Descent posted:I had heard that the books' writing level kind of "grew up" along with the main characters, and I was curious to see what that meant, but I never actually got around to reading the rest of the series. Was it just another example of mid-2000s media deciding that darker and grittier equals better? That's a little sad. It wasn't just that. Harry started dating, for instance.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:51
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Powered Descent posted:I read the first Harry Potter book, just to see what all the fuss was about. It struck me as perfectly solid kid-lit, the sort of thing 10-year-old me would have really liked (even though I've always preferred spaceships-and-robots stuff to wizards-and-ghosts). It got more sophisticated inline with the aging of the presumed audience; some of that was more mature content, but a lot was just bigger words, more complex sentences, and yes, longer overall. This was a good trend that was capitalized on by better authors. Tamora Peirce in particular really nailed it in the Circle books where the first quadrilogy are kids books, and then the next is middlegrade, and the ones after are properly YA. Since Rowling seems bound and determined to reduce her legacy from 'complicated' to 'piss' at the very least she opened the door on stuff that better kid and young adult authors could take advantage of.
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Sep 14, 2020 22:10
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I love Foucault's Pendulum. i wasn't making a dig, that's what the book is about
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Sep 14, 2020 22:50
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EL BROMANCE posted:I only ever saw the films, but it always amused me that there was this chosen child who could do no wrong, and had been involved in multiple incidents at the school where he was always right... and still in like book 6 or something nobody would believe him when he would say something bad is happening. That really isn't how I remember the character. Harry is brave and has a good heart but has a tendency to act without thinking. He's not as smart as Hermione and doesn't think things through. But it has been awhile since I read the books...
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Sep 14, 2020 23:27
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Tater Love 
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I was the same age as Harry when the first book came out and had the pleasure of growing up alongside Harry so to speak. It was a really cool experience to age and mature alongside a character like than and I'm glad I had the experience. I also reread all the preceding books each time a book came out and even at 16-17 I noted I was aging beyond my ability to relate to the first book like I did when I was 11. EL BROMANCE posted:I only ever saw the films, but it always amused me that there was this chosen child who could do no wrong, and had been involved in multiple incidents at the school where he was always right... and still in like book 6 or something nobody would believe him when he would say something bad is happening. The adults are oblivious to how bad they're loving everything up while the fascists rise so the kids need to see through the nonsense and step up to fix it is about the most practical advice a boomer could give young kids though.
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Sep 14, 2020 23:51
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One thing that really makes the later potters fail for me is that the wizarding world works in the dark, surreal, whimsical earlier books, but when she pivots into angst and nazi analogies the wizarding world becomes a horrifying dystopia.
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Sep 15, 2020 00:03
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Soylent Pudding posted:The adults are oblivious to how bad they're loving everything up while the fascists rise It's like people doing stupid poo poo in horror movies and getting themselves killed. It's a little harder to call it unrealistic in 2020.
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Sep 15, 2020 00:35
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:One thing that really makes the later potters fail for me is that the wizarding world works in the dark, surreal, whimsical earlier books, but when she pivots into angst and nazi analogies the wizarding world becomes a horrifying dystopia. Alternatively, the wizarding world was always a horrifying dystopia only made wondrous by Harry's position as an abused child, and the darker progression of the books is Harry realizing and coming to terms with that reality. It's a failure of leftism that no one has written Harry Potter and the Dawning of Class Consciousness.
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Sep 15, 2020 00:47
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I just think of how much it would suck to be going to Hogwarts and be anyone outside of Potter’s social circle. Nothing you do matters for like 7 years of your life, you just watch some rich legacy kid break a bunch of rules and get rewarded for it. Should have been a lot more animosity for ol’ HP by the end. And yeah that’s the plight of any ancillary character but it sticks with me due to the length that they’re just stuck in this kid’s shadow. Whatever. It gave us Wizard People Dear Reader which is better than nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPVhmZodaLA
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Sep 15, 2020 00:53
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there wolf posted:Alternatively, the wizarding world was always a horrifying dystopia only made wondrous by Harry's position as an abused child, and the darker progression of the books is Harry realizing and coming to terms with that reality. It's a failure of leftism that no one has written Harry Potter and the Dawning of Class Consciousness. Between that and the "they like being enslaved stop being such a bleeding heart" subplot, the Banker Trolls and their coding, and Rowling's TERF leanings... it's hard to not read the whole story as very hardcore conservative, pretending to be liberal because it nominally doesn't hate brown people.
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