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First up, I love Harry Potter. That's a bit of an understatement, I'm mildly obsessed with Harry Potter. That's possibly an understatement too, but I don't want to come across as too scary. There are certainly scarier Harry Potter fans out there (I know, coz I'm friends with some of them).
Second up, I'm writing this with five days to go until the Order of the Phoenix is published, just so you can put it in context.
When the whole craze thang started, I was resolutely taking no notice. I try to avoid hugely popular things on principle (just for the record, I was into Pok�mon before it got hugely popular, OK?), and besides, they were just kids' books, and therefore beneath me. I do have a shelf of kids' books, but they're all stuff I read when I was wickle, and that's acceptable. Because (switch perspective...) you originally read them when you were a child, and therefore not entirely sentient. Now you're a more sophisticated being entirely, and you can still enjoy them because you enjoy remembering enjoying them then, but if you read them for the first time now, you wouldn't be as impressed. If you see what I mean... Anyway, the point was, I didn't read new kids' books, only old ones that I'd read already. And then all my friends started reading Harry Potter, and conversations would often drift that way, and I'd be all like 'I'm just going to sit here and feel superior, you talk amongst yourselves'. They'd all got over the initial enthusiasm, and were coasting happily down the getting-on-with-life stage of Harry Potter fandom by the time I finally gave in. I didn't have much to read at the time, and Bert offered to lend me his copies. I said yes, figuring that at least I'd know what the hell they were all on about, and borrowed Philosopher's Stone. I read it one afternoon. I thought it was OK for a kids' book, well-written, but nothing really original, and totally wasn't seeing what everyone was so excited about, until she fooled me. I was still on my 'all kids' books are written for morons, it's so obvious what's going to happen, I'm so far above this sort of piffling trash' kick, and was genuinely shocked and disturbed when she managed to totally surprise me with the end. So I sat back and thought about it for a while, then took the book back to Bert and demanded he hand over all the others.
So I read the others (up to Goblet of Fire), then demanded to know when the next one was due out. Nobody knew, but the current speculation was some time after the Chamber of Secrets movie was released. I felt that was unacceptable, and communicated thus to my dear, dear friends. However (did I mention they were at the getting-on-with-life stage?) this was not met with much in the way of sympathy, and no matter how often I pointed out that our situations were not in the least bit comparable - they'd had Goblet of Fire released fairly soon after they'd finished the first three, they'd had the movie (which I didn't actually succeed in seeing for quite some time. And then wished I hadn't), what the hell was their problem anyway, it's not like they read under normal circumstances, I didn't care how much longer they'd been waiting than me, I just felt things more than them - my pain was met with derision. Bastards.
But I've calmed down since then. I've bought my own copies and read them a few times (I've lost count - maybe four or five? Something like that, anyway), and have achieved a little distance. In fact, I'm almost at the getting-on-with-life stage myself (I'd like to thank Pok�mon Sapphire for it's sterling work in aiding my recovery).
The problem with Rowling (you have to say it with just the right degree of awe and malice) is that she's an amazingly gifted writer. She's taken a clich�d situation that's been done a million times before, lifted a few ideas from here and there (spotting who's been plagiarised by Rowling is a fun game, and I intend to draw up some rules and scoring systems at some point) squooged them all together, and created something frighteningly addictive. She's totally got what Stephen King calls the 'gotta see' factor - it doesn't matter that you've got a bus to catch in two minutes, if it's five in the morning and you've got to get up and go to work in the morning, if you've locked yourself in the bathroom and the whole bloody street's hammering on the door, you've just gotta see what happens next. And that's why she sells books (bitch!).
I have to be honest, some of my hatred (is hatred too strong a word? I'm not sure that it is, you know...) for Rowling comes directly from envy. I wish I could write like her... Of course, the vast majority of my hatred stems from the fact that I cannot chain her to a typewriter and beat her with blunt objects until she's finished books five to seven (and a couple of spin-off series, maybe. That would be nice). And then there's a teeny little bit that hates her because she's rich. Of course, there's still the substantial chunk of resentment over the amount of my life, that I could have (wouldn't have, of course, but that's beside the point) spent productively, that's been absorbed by her creation.
Speaking of envy, an unfortunate side-effect of reading too much Harry Potter is the condition which Eddie Izzard refers to as Wizard envy. I had it bad (Again, I've calmed down since then. Mostly. You can hand me any vaguely wand-shaped object and I will try and duel with it, but that's another matter entirely). As the name suggests, it's basically resentment that you can't do magic, and it can be quite crippling, especially if you're already emotionally fragile from lack of closure caused by bastard authors who leave books on cliffhangers and then don't publish the next one for a million years. Your brain does things when you're not looking, such as inserting the word 'apparate' into conversation when you meant 'appear'. Then people think you're slightly madder than you are.
The whole Harry Potter thing has changed the whole way I look at children's literature. Before, as previously mentioned, I'd only touch a kids' book if it was something I'd already read (when I actually was a child, when it was acceptable). I'd treat the children's section in bookshops the same way as the underwear section in clothes shops - something to be scuttled through taking great care not to look at or touch anything for fear of contamination - but now it's usually my first port of call (why? Because me bloke, possibly out of altruism, probably to get me to shut the fuck up about the lack of new Harry Potter, got me hooked on Diana Wynne Jones, whose books he read when he was wickle, but which I'd never come across before. She's bloody good, and everyone should buy her books). I've had a similar change of heart regarding fantasy in general. I've never been very interested in fantasy as a genre, outside of Lord of the Rings and Discworld (oh, and Flight of the Horse), I always assumed that fantasy was childish and pointless. Isaac Asimov described science fiction as "fantasy stories that are required to stay within the realms of scientific plausibility" and I pretty much agreed. I didn't see the point of things that weren't rational and/or plausible, but then I desperately wanted to be a science geek (what can I say? Too much Star Trek as a small impressionable child). It took two (nasty) years of A level courses to convince me that my brain really was not of a scientific bent. I've mellowed out a bit since then. Now, although I'll still read anything (at all. Really) that's science fiction absolutely indiscriminately, I'm willing to read middling to good fantasy. Which is a huge leap forward, believe me.
And the really annoying thing is that I should have known better. I did the exact same thing with Stephen King. I assumed that because he was a) a horror writer (I've read Richard Lewis, I know there are some terrible cheap horror books out there) and b) insanely popular (I've read Clive Cussler, I know there are some terrible bestselling books out there), his books were somehow beneath me, and not worth the bother. In the end, a friend forced some on me, and I've been hooked ever since.
Of course, one of the problems with being a Harry Potter fan (one of the minor ones - I would attempt to detail the major ones, but I'm afraid the rant might get a bit overranty) is that it's another fandom that needs to be constantly defended. I like Star Trek. I like Blake's 7. I worship anything Gerry Anderson's touched with a bargepole. I didn't really need to love something else that a shocking amount of people feel needs to be roundly mocked to my face. And the worst thing is, the only thing you can say is 'read the books'. Because, in the end, the writing quality's all it's got going for it. Star Trek, you can defend on sociological grounds. Blake's 7, you can defend on the grounds that it's not another Star Trek clone. Anderson... well, I scream louder than most anti-Andersonites (another method is to challenge them to name at least ten of his TV series and three of his movies, and if they can't, declare them far too ignorant to pass judgement, then stick your fingers in your ears and sing until they go away). Harry Potter - you tell someone to read the books and they say 'no thanks, I am over twelve, and I do have some self respect, thank you so very much. And I really can't argue with that, because that's exactly the way I felt until boredom drove me to them. So pretty much all you can say is 'fine. Don't read them. But if you were a bit more open-minded, you might just find something that you'll really enjoy.'
Which I think is the moral of the rant... I'm a bit scared now, I'm not used to writing stuff that has a point.
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