Toas.terlicio.us

Sadly, haven’t been playing many games or suffering many fits of total geekery lately.

Naturally, as soon as I made that statement, I realized that it wasn’t true. Whoopsie.

My total geekery has taken a slightly different form in the past few weeks, I guess. I’m still really enjoying Eastern Weyr, of course, and acquiring my own set of characters I really enjoy (one is such a crossover dork trip), and I’m looking into some other related fandom misadventure. But my renewed interest in Pern fandom inspired me to pick up Dragonflight and Dragonquest again. Having read those two books, I don’t think I have any desire to keep rereading through the (still-growing) canon. My memory of my sixteen-year-old self’s reaction was accurate: yeah, it worked when I was thirteen, but the writing doesn’t hold up to the world the novels contain.

It’s sort of the same experience I had with the Harry Potter series, though I know it’s heretical. I got into an argument with a certain monsieur not too long ago about the relative quality (if, as the prevarication went, there is such a thing) of the touchstone youth books. The argument runs that if you admit the world is engaging (I do) and if you can read 700 pages in one sitting (I did, saving unavoidable obstacles), then how is the piece not “good literature”? For the time, I’ll drop that descriptor. It’s useless, and feeds back into the image of a pure literary canon, a metaphorical room of fixed size containing a fixed number of busts of a fixed set of authors and their works. Dead dull, right? I mean, even for those of us who regularly and happily engage with Shakespeare. The issue I take with the Harry Potter books, however, is much the same as with the Pern series: though I enjoy the worlds in which they take place, and though I read the books avidly and quickly, and though I have been engaged, I do not leave as engaged as I’d like. I dismiss Harry and his compatriots. The most interesting character was Snape . . . until he was explained. Then he became a bit of a shell, though he remained fuller in aspect and in retention of my interest than the rest. I take nothing from the characters. I take nothing from the story. I leave with a world, which is fine, but when the whole lacks resonance, you’re left with . . . well, shit, you’re left with the first two Harry Potter movies!

Pern fares slightly better, perhaps partly because the world caught me when I was at the right age (for me, eleven to thirteen or thereabouts). There’s a problem in that age assumption, though: I can still situate myself in Pern. It’s not half so narrow in scope. Where would I want to be in Harry Potter’s world? Fighting Voldemort? Attending Hogwarts? Not for me.

I can sense that I’m rambling beyond my normal bounds of nonsensical, so I’ll stop.

We should all just read Agatha Christie and John Donne until we die.