Harriet
I’ve been reading Harry Potter to Laura a little bit — only when she brings it to me; I don’t bring it up myself. It’s not that I mind it so much, but I wonder if other people who have read Douglas Adams or Fay Weldon or C.S. Lewis find this Potter stuff as skim-milky as I have. It feels like someone carefully analyzed all the little verbal tricks and tics in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, sorted out the ones that work the most reliably, and then tinker-toyed a bunch of them together, with some plot points for connectors, hoping for a similar effect. It doesn’t work, of course. At some points it sits on the page like the lab-spawned text in those Disney picture books, refusing to move. At its best it manages to be a little bit coy where Adams was maddening, and comfortably eccentric in the spots where Adams achieved full wacko-hood. But we slog through it, sporadically. The only thing that keeps me on the ball through some of the muddier pages is Laura’s insistence that the hero be called Harriet, which forces a certain alertness. She catches me every time I forget.
Categorised as: Read this to me