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> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or s
by CalChris 1y ago
> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter?
So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….
What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.
Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.
I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.
Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.
- ryathal 1y agoThere's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.