cahn

-Why did no-one tell me that the voice of Quasimodo in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is Tom Hulce, who played Mozart in Amadeus? Did everyone else know this but me? It's... a weird mental image in my mind, now.

-The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie) is, I think, not one of the better Christies, but the one thing that made it hilarious to me was that one of the characters is a mysterious "Mrs. Lestrange." I spent the entire book, whenever she showed up, inventing ways to reconcile the character with Bellatrix Lestrange. (Alas, she did not, in fact, turn out to be a sociopath Death Eater. But that would have been awesome!)

-Tangled is a much more entertaining movie if you watch it thinking of a sort-of alternate Eugenides (from the Megan Whalen Turner books) as the main male character. (I know i'm not the first to think this. Still.)

-I was rereading Tam Lin, which I adore (I blame it for leading me to believe everyone in college spouted random Greek and Shakespeare -- turns out, not so much for physics majors), for various nefarious reasons. I think when I first read it, in high school, I might have found the college sex hijinks vaguely titillating. This time around, I was all "OMG ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUSLY NOT USING CONDOMS AND USING HERBAL TEA BIRTH CONTROL WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?" Okay, yes, it's set in the 1970's when people didn't worry about HIV, but still! I was rather amused by my change in reaction over the last twenty years (as well as slightly appalled that it wasn't my reaction as a teenager :) )

Not to be confused with things that push my buttons -- these are things that make me bounce up and down and proclaim "This is awesome!" (and more likely to be plot- or meta-based) as opposed to things that make me fall utterly in love (which are more likely to be character-based).

-Stories that are ambitious -- that go off in a number of epic directions. Like, I love how Dune is about the problem of prescience and power struggles and Messiah legends and ecology! John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting is about magic and vampires and religion and an answer to Charles Williams' Byzantium and the problem of Richard III.

-Characters who are plotting-within-plots. What I mean by this is something like Dune, where all the characters say one thing and mean another, and then they have some twisty plot they're trying to advance underneath that. I realize this can rapidly turn into laziness -- I think Dune is probably rather lazy in this regard, what with all the explicit notes on how the Baron really is communicating X when he says Y. But I love it anyway.

-Characters who are smart! Or at least not criminally stupid. If I want to read about really stupid people I'll pick up one of my old journals, thanks. I don't expect my fiction heroes to be perfect -- in fact that's boring -- but stupid is even more boring. (Here I must mention, not in a good way, Harry Potter, and even worse, George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light.)

-Correct discussion of science, particularly physics. Seriously, if I never read another discussion of the EPR paradox that says "This means you could transfer information faster than light!" it will be too soon. (Bill Bryson, I am looking at you! You are single-handedly responsible for several people I know having to be disabused of this notion.)

-A mindset that thinks scientists/the scientific method/analytical thinking are cool. The canonical example for me is Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books -- actually those go a little too far in this direction, as I find her scientist-worshipping society a little too pat and a little too idealistic for my taste. But in general, books where a character has a somewhat analytical, skeptical view (e.g., Cazaril in Curse of Chalion) do well with me.

-Allusions to things I think are cool -- I will like you if you quote John Donne or e.e. cummings, and I will utterly think you are made of awesome if you show me you have read Charles Williams, Cordwainer Smith, or the Mabinogion.

-Meta/criticism of canon, if you're working off of some established canon. My favorite published example of this are John M. Ford's Star Trek novels, in one of which he takes down the entire approach to Klingons (um, be aware this was before Next Gen and all of that), and in the other he turns Star Trek into a musical. A book-length one. Literally.

Okay, I, um. I thought, especially once the last book came out, I was done reading Harry Potter fanfic and we could just ignore that episode in my life entirely, yeah? And then I stumbled across Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, an AU, where -- what would happen if a) Harry were brought up in a loving super-rational super-academic household, and b) everyone and everything in the HP universe was, well... more-or-less reasonable? (Not necessarily sane, mind you -- just not holding the Idiot Ball.)

It's like this fic took all the things that make me go squee! and plugged directly into those areas of my brain. Harry starts out by explaining things like observer bias to various people at Hogwart, and decides to run experiments to figure out how magic works! He explains Punnett squares to Draco in the context of blood purity! The first several chapters are a little one-note like that, but I don't care because I love that note! I would have loved it had it all been riffs on that, but as it progresses it also acquires a really interesting plot, layers on layers of hints to be explained, I think maybe every character in the entire fic is now involved in at least one secret plot, and I find the relationship between Harry and Draco extremely moving (and no, not in that way; it's gen/het).

Remember how in The Magicians I was practically mortally offended that on discovering Wood Between the World no one ever thought of doing any experiments? Yeah. This is the answer to that.

Note: this is a WIP. I don't read WIPs. I definitely don't rec them. This is what this thing has done to my brain!

This link, that I got from J last night, is for joyce, who complained about this very issue. This just goes to show, I think, that Harry is completely oblivious. Because really, I bet you Hermione figured it out sometime, oh, second year or so.

(Not that I'm blaming him. My high school turns out, probably like most high schools, to have been a seething mass of hormones going every which way, but I only figured out the girl-boy ones at the time because I was also totally oblivious (and did not have the interweb/fandom to educate me). If I'd been the high school hero of a book, readers would have thought the school was made up entirely of heterosexuals, which turns out to have been very far from the truth.)

In the interest of being able to say "I told you so" (or alternatively "You told me so"), here are my HP predictions:

1. Snape is good. Also, he is so dead.
2. Harry won't die (a recent conversion of mine; until about a month ago I totally thought he was going to kick the bucket).
3. Malfoy will convert messily to good, then die or be gravely wounded.
4. One of the Weasleys will die, but it won't be the parents or Ron or Ginny. My money's on one of the twins.
5. Snape will turn out to have had feelings for Lily, which is why Dumbledore trusted him, and why he never told Harry. There will continue to be just about zero reason why he didn't tell McGonagall anything useful.
6. (okay, this one's a bit far out) Pettigrew will deliver the killing blow to the Dark Lord.

Things I wish would happen in Book 7, but probably won't:
1. Krum comes back and kicks Ron out of Hermione's affections.
2. Barring that, Ron and Hermione call it quits and she starts dating Harry.
3. Ron grows up. (Actually, I give this a 40% chance. Please?)
4. Snape turns out to be working for the highest bidder, and isn't on the side of "good" or "evil" at all.
5. Dumbledore had a good reason not to actually, you know, teach Harry useful magic in his "tutoring" sessions. Along with this, he had a good non-expository-backstory reason to tell Harry Riddle's story.
6. Harry realizes that jumping to conclusions about people being evil is wrong, and maybe one of these days he should stop doing that, even if he is right once in a while.
7. Harry makes any effort at all to practice Occlumency.

(Occlumency... by the way... "Blocked again and again and again until you keep your mouth shut and your mind closed!" Replace "shut" and "closed" with "open" and "free" and this would be a good description of what my singing teacher says to me. EVERY WEEK. Grr. Singing is like the anti-Occlumency!)

Okay. I'll try to stop now with the potter. At least until july 21. I will. (Now that we've finished the sixth book, this will be a bit easier.)

We're more than halfway through Book 6 by now, but I kept forgetting to post this...

This book frustrated me, though not for the reasons I expected. ALLCAPS!Harry didn't bother me as much as he did first time through because I knew it was coming (and rather skimmed those sections, actually). And actually it makes a lot of sense for his character-- he's a teenager, and teenagers are famously resentful and stupid. At least, I was :) But (like I keep telling J when Veronica Mars does something stupid) I read books and watch TV so that I can see people who are better than me, not people who keep making the same mistakes I do!

What's frustrating is that so many parts of this book are actually really quite good (which I'd forgotten). Locally-- on the word choice and day-to-day experiences of the Trio-- I think Rowling has become a much much better writer than she was in book 1. Little set pieces, like Fred and George's flight to freedom (no matter what you may think of their characters) are gems! The mid-level stuff is quite good too-- she's always been good at weaving in mention of seemingly innocuous details that turn out to be plot-essential later, and she's still good here. And the pacing of the Trio figuring out stuff is quite good.

And then on the global level everything just falls down, grr. Not because the plot isn't good-- the whole Occlumency thing and the tragedy of Sirius is actually really good, much better than I remember, all of Harry's weaknesses and many of his strengths turned to Voldemort's purpose, wow-- but because the plot goal is so very meaningless that it's impossible to suspend one's disbelief. I mean, in GoF, yeah, it was kind of nonsensical that "Moody" didn't just lure Harry away with sweets or something instead of this whole Rube Goldberg Triwizard scheme, but the momentum of the plot and the importance of Voldemort's resurrection to the entire arc let me (briefly) forget that. Here, when I find out the whole big deal was about a prophecy-- one that is, anyway, in Dumbledore's head, and one which, moreover, does not actually give anyone any information that was not known already... I mean, how many people honestly didn't think that at least one of them had to die at the end? -- it just jerks me out of my happy suspension of disbelief and makes me upset. And at least one of the "mysteries"-- who sent the dementors after Harry?-- the biggest problem with it is not the silliness of Umbridge, who even as Pure Evil ought to be able to find better things to do with her time; nor is it the unbelievability of it (Umbridge, who can't even get rid of a flippin' swamp that McGonagall could demolish instantly, can control Dementors without anyone at the Ministry knowing? Yeah right); but rather the plot pacing: much like this sentence, the book goes on and on and gets so far from the point that by the time the point actually shows up, the reader doesn't actually care at all!

And, um? Dumbledore? Is an authorial manipulation from beginning to end ("Petunia, remember my last!" Who talks like that?! Note to Dumbledore: most people use the noun their adjectives modify, like, "Remember my last plot device!"). And I hate that. Also, hypocrite! if I had the choice between being manhandled and shaken by a teacher, or having my memory totally modified by a teacher (or by someone authorized by a teacher), um, to me one of these is MUCH WORSE than the other. Dumbledore has suddenly flipped from one of my favorite characters to one of my least favorite.

Also, I adore McGonagall with a passion, and always have; she's probably the only person, in fact, that I'm not seriously annoyed with right now. Well, I guess I still like Hermione, as her weird passion for freckles doesn't really show up until the next book.

Speaking of which, I'm going to assume that Pomfrey, out of some misguided sense of loyalty towards Harry or something, could totally fix Marietta's face and doesn't, because I'd much rather dislike Pomfrey than Hermione.

I barely skimmed the last five chapters or so, which saves you from a rant on centaurs and Sirius and Dumbledore and so on. Um. It does not seem to have saved you from a rant on Dumbledore, actually. Never mind.

I really do read other books besides Harry Potter, I swear! I promise the next post will not mention HP at all! But we finished PoA last night, and I want to post before I forget everything.

So I kind of skipped over posting on PoA, which is my favorite and probably still is, for that awesome scene in the end with Sirius and Lupin and Harry... sigh. So, yeah, not that much to say about it, except the following: I'd always nourished a secret hope that all the silly Divination stuff in PoA was actually for real: that is, when Harry reads Ron's tealeaves and predicts a hard but ultimately happy life for him, and when Ron predicts death for Harry, those are... actually real predictions for Book 7. But my faith in this was shattered when Trelawny declares that the first to get up [from a table of thirteen] will be the first to die! Because Ron and Harry got up first from that table... and neither was the first to die. McGonagall oughtta give her a pay decrease. (I wonder what Seers do when you confront them with an obviously wrong prediction?)

This was also the book where I lost faith that Rowling had been subtly mentioning Snape's Legilimancy powers, because he doesn't seem to use them in any occasion where it would actually, you know, be useful to him, like looking into Ron or Hermione's mind (even assuming that Harry himself was good at Occlumency, which is obviously untrue) at the end.

GoF is now either my favorite or second favorite. Rowling's writing style continues to improve from book to book, and this may also be the book where the plot becomes the most convoluted and fun to follow through all the little hints she gives. And hee, I love the Hermione/Harry relationship, and I adore Krum. However, it's also where the plot Makes Even Less Rational Sense than Normal (or maybe I've just become more sensitive to these things) and where I become convinced that Voldemort is The Dumbest Dark Lord Ever. I mean, honestly, why does Moody teach Harry how to resist curses? And why doesn't he just prepare a Portkey at the beginning of the year and send Harry off? What's the point of the convolutions of the plot? And um, when you get your nemesis alone and defenseless, you don't do a wizard duel with him to prove your superiority, you kill him! And how can Voldemort not know about Priori Incantatem, when Sirius does?

At least it's got a plot, mind you. I'm not so much looking forward to the plotlessness of OotP or the half-a-plot of HBP, which reads to me like the first half of a book.

More thoughts:

-Snape shows up in "Moody's" Foe-Glass, and he does try his best to convince Fudge that Voldemort has risen. But he's even more unreasonably paranoid concerning Harry (especially for someone who knows Legilimancy!) than before. ...You know, I don't think there's any way Rowling can save Snape for me now in a way that's consistent with his actions in all the books. Unless, hm, Snape is working for himself, neither for Dumbledore or Voldemort. I might buy that.

-I predict (hope! Oh, Hermione, don't throw yourself away on Ron!) that Krum will be back in Book 7. Dumbledore all but announces it at the end.

-I really enjoyed Harry's preparing for the third task, which I'd completely forgotten about. Reminds me of high school, preparing for Science Olympiad or something nerdy like that.

-All the scenes with Diggory's parents broke my heart, even when his dad is being extremely silly, because he's so clearly proud of Cedric, and you know what's going to happen.

We've now finished Chamber of Secrets (actually we're most of the way through PoA, but I'm slow posting), and I was trying to figure out why Gilderoy Lockhart is funny to me, while on the other hand my hatred for Dobby burns with the fire of a thousand suns. Both of them are kind of over-the-top characters who cause a great deal of unnecessary damage. In fact, you could argue that bumbling, thick Lockhart is really more of a Jarjar binks character than is Dobby, but I rank JarJar and Dobby together in terms of sheer and utter annoyance, whereas I actually like scenes with Lockhart quite a bit.

Part of it is that I have a deep hatred for characters not being given the information they need. (Dumbledore, although I love him, has suffered substantially in my estimation, especially in Books 5 and 6, because of this. (It was always fairly easy to ignore him before, because he was relatively such a small part of the books.) I mean, it just seems like he could have given Harry *much* more useful information than stupid forays into Tom's past...) And Dobby is a prime offender in this regard, though he has plot reasons for not being able to reveal things. Lockhart has no important information, so he doesn't annoy me as much.

Also, I have an even deeper loathing, in real life as well as books, for those who don't even make the semblance of rational discourse, and Dobby falls into this category. Note that my standards are not exactly high, here. I don't need you to agree with me, or to display ironclad logic (or really any logic at all), or even to change your opinion when I display some ironclad logic or point out some fallacy in your argument. I'm merely asking here that you at least make the effort to look like you're listening to what I'm saying.

Dobby basically does this exact thing early in the book-- Harry's asking him nicely not to get him in total trouble, and Dobby acts as if Harry isn't even saying anything, which I can't stand. Of course, Lockhart doesn't do the whole rational-discourse thing either, but at least a) Harry and friends use this tendency (to get the pass for the Restricted Section), which is nice, and b) Lockharts gets whapped a lot for it. And that's my other thing-- perhaps because I am not a very nice person, I thrive on the annoying and evil characters getting their comeuppance. I just love it. One of the reasons I read trashy novels every so often. And Dobby gets rewarded for being annoying. So not fair! Whine whine!

More thoughts on CoS:

-Harry is really, really likeable in books 1 and 2. Too bad he becomes such a whiny teenager.

-Snape being a Legilimens has been foreshadowed, I think, 3 times so far (e.g., Harry thinks Snape knows it was Harry who made the diversion so Hermione could steal the Boomslang). I hadn't noticed this before. Well, either that, or Snape and/or Harry are paranoid.

-Given that Hogwarts didn't expel the Marauders who, you know, endangered another student's life, what made Snape, of all people, think that Harry would get expelled for flying a car? Are the outside-Hogwarts-magic restrictions really that much more serious?