Rereading Harry Potter as an adult and finding it difficult

[Dasisr]

Obsessed with Harry Potter as a teenager but finding it a difficult read as an adult. How badly he is treated by the Dursleys. How deprived of love he was and in later books how he was kept away from his friends/family. All the death of loved ones he had to witness. Honestly finding it tough to get through. AIBU or anyone else the same?

What makes you say it is falling out of favour with children?
Do you have evidence for that?

I reread it while breastfeeding a newborn, so I had pretty heightened reactions to some of it. The bit that I'd forgotten about though and that really surprised me by how dark it was the treatment of the Muggle family at the beginning of Goblet of Fire.

I don't even like the films and my daughter always said it was unbelievable

Flying cars, fire-breathing dragons and turning teacups into mice are unbelievable? Give that child a medal.

Unfortunately for you, it isn't falling out of favour, as teachers all over the world have confirmed.

Im sure it makes you feel very literary to say this, but honestly, its simply not true. There is no one way to write well. Her characters are strong, the world is rich and detailed and the narrative is well paced and full. Hence their popularity.
They are not, however, written to be read out loud. Definitely not. I think pretty much everyone I know who has attempted to read them out loud has found similar.
I don’t know your children’s ages but if they are old enough for the HP series then they should be old enough to read it to themselves.

Neville got actual housepoints for bravery in film 1. He's lived with PTSD from what he witnessed, losing his parents to their torture and being bullied and belittled by his grandmother, the thing he's most afraid of, and stands up to the boggart who uses that. Joins the DA and is part of the resistance and gets to wield the sword that takes out Nagini. I think focussing on his story might have been even more interesting!

And no sorry, whoever tried it, interest in HO is not dwindling. Cursed Child is huge, the books are huge, boys especially are reading because of the books. Did you see the blind girl in ecstasy because she realised her present was a giant Braille HP and she could now read it for herself?

@EscapeRoomToTheSun

That’s a silly comment. You should go into the primary schools I work in. Children still reading the novels, which are still getting kids to read (which is great whatever you think of the books) and playing Harry Potter in the playground. It is definitely not a disappearing set of novels.

My OH was not brought up with books (I hoovered up books from childhood). When Dan Brown's book the da Vinci code came out I persuaded him to read it as it's all very very short chapters. He did so, and enjoyed it, and since then he's been reading books (he was 50 at the time). Dan Brown's writing was also slated as being very poor, but so what? It's a rattling good tale that carried you along, and it got him reading after so many years. If Harry Potter does the same for children, then great. Personally I love the books and the films.

I think harry Potter on it long journey to be a classic series more than falling in out of favour.

Dan Brown's writing was also slated as being very poor, but so what? It's a rattling good tale that carried you along, and it got him reading after so many years

I've seen Agatha Christie writing disparaged on here - got my Dad reading as a struggling teen reader- did same for me and was a set of many books including Harry Potter that did same for my teens.

I'm glad it's falling out of favour with children.

I fear you have been misinformed.

Her characters are strong, the world is rich and detailed and the narrative is well paced and full. Hence their popularity.

Yes. The strength is in the storytelling, not in the clumsy prose. Being hard to read out loud is not a strength.

*It's clumsily written.

Stephen Fry can make the most of clumsily written text - and here he has to.*

You claim you found it hard to read due to it being clumsily written.

I'm pointing out that many able readers don't find that to be the case, as in the case if Stephen Fry. He reads the exact words, as written, and - having read interviews by him - as guided by JK Rowling. He doesn't add or change any of the prose, yet reads it exceptionally well with no apparent difficulty.

Yes, it's fine. You don't like it. That's allowed. To be fair - I doubt you are the target market for it anyway.

Is it?

I teach primary. Many of the children reach a stage where they become obsessed with it for a while ime. I haven't seen that drop.
Granted I suspect many don't buy it so much these days - I suspect lots of households already have the whole series already so no need.

Stand near most primary schools on world book day. You still see many a HP character showing up - it's not diminishing that much from what I can tell!

I claim (I don't claim - I did!) I found it hard to read out loud.

I am more than happy to admit that Stephen Fry is better at reading out loud than I am. Stephen Fry is one of the nation's great readers-out-loud.

"You claim to find this marathon course difficult, yet Mo Farah ran it with ease!"

What does it matter if you found it hard to read out loud, it was never really meant to be read out loud in the first place. They are aimed at readers of an sge thst reading independently

Being hard to read out loud is not a strength.

No, it's not. I've just never encountered anyone else who said they found the books hard to read aloud. Presumably thousands if not millions of parents have read HP aloud to their children, and many teachers have probably read it to their classes. I found it a joy to read the first couple to my dc before they took over and read them independently.

I don't normally listen to fiction audiobooks except foreign ones, and have listened to some of the Potter books in several different languages as an easy, lighthearted way to keep my language knowledge ticking over. I'm happy to say that I find them just as un-clumsy in other languages, and it's fun to see how the translators have dealt with the invented vocab, place names etc.

In fact I always recommend this to my older students and anyone wanting to improve or brush up on a language they know a bit of. Listening to a familiar English book whose storyline you know well is a great way to do tons of listening, improve vocab and feel for the language.

The Da Vinci Code is a bestseller for a reason - it has tremendous pace and twists. Right at the end, the author tries to wrap up the relationship between the main protagonists and it is very clumsy because he can't write people and his characters are just pawns who keep the plot moving along. But that won't stop people enjoying the book.

JKR is much better and her characters are properly fleshed out to the extent that you care about them as individuals. Yes, some of the books are overlong and the series is not aimed at an adult audience. But Lord of the Rings is also overlong with lots of pointless wordy descriptions.

I've got an English degree. I wish I could write like JKR. I wish I could write like Dan Brown. I wouldn't be embarrassed at all.

I have also read them aloud to my DS and found them difficult in the mouth, though I think it's the combination of prose that is serviceable at best and the increasingly endless detail as the series moves towards its close, that makes it unpleasant to read aloud, and I always find myself wanting to cut as I go.

Enid Blyton is equally banal as a prose writer, but has a lighter touch as a world-builder, and of course wrote these short, strictly-disciplined, formulaic novels, and wrote them very rapidly. She would knock out a Famous Five novel in a week, rather than the increasingly length, complexity etc of the HP novels.

I think the HP series just changes so much as it continues, and part of the issue is JKR's disabling sense of responsibility to her own massive fan base, who just wanted more words, more detail, more backstory, more explanation of how magic concept x actually worked, so every possible pudding got over-egged, stopped working as novels, plus there was the problem of who exactly the implied reader was -- a child? A young adult? Someone who had grown up along with the series? It's mirrored in the twee Disneyish Chris Columbus early films, and the much darker tone that Alfonso Cuarón introduced.

Have also read some of them in French to my French godchildren, and wasn't keen on the French translations, either. The Irish version of Philosopher's Stone was better, I thought. I do feel a lot of affection for the series, though.

I found the first hard to read out loud. I read daily through lots of books over a number of years and I only struggled with two books when reading out loud. I didn't for that reason read beyond the first and told ds to read the others himself if he was interested.

I'm not sure exactly why it was hard. The other book had lots of pages that were just brief dialogue:
"Mummy!"
"Really?"
"Please!"
"Are you sure..?"
"Yes."
"Okay, then."
"Thank you, mummy..."

Both stories read fine in my head, but just felt wrong reading out loud.

I know there are unpleasant thin characters. But some people were saying there are "many" examples of overweight characters who are not unpleasant, but I could only think of Mrs Weasley.

@Dragonwindow that's more to do more with your memory than the writer's intent?

Mrs Weasley
Professor Sprout
Neville
Hagrid
Madame Maxine (sorry she's big boned 😬)
The fat lady
The fat friar

And if I'm not mistaken, Helga Hufflepuff, one of the founding members is overweight as well or at least portrayed as such.

I know the actress that plays madam Rosmerta isn't overweight, but she's also not as curvy as I imagined her in my head. She's also taller .

Wait until you get to Dobby.... ☠️😭

I'd say there was a fairly equal amount of thin and overweight people on both sides of the spectrum, to be honest.