Well, yeah. Harry is determined, brave, and loyal to his friends, but he’s not a brilliant student; the stuff he excels in, dueling and defense against Dark Arts, is because he’s got more personal experience in surviving the stuff than most adult wizards ever do (or want to). But it’s definitely intentional that he needs Hermione and Ron’s help, both as a student and as protagonist; not to mention other students like Neville and Luna, Hagrid, the whole Weasley family, and more.
Rowling’s shown herself to be a shitty person, and her worldbuilding is far from coherent (and the further away she gets from Britain, the more cliches, stereotypes and just plain weirdness creep in), but she actually did a good job with Harry’s characterization and that of his friends and comrades.
Example, the broomstick magic could include a sort of invisible magic-cusion/seat alongside the levitation parts. Tadaa! instant rideable broomstick that makes sense if magic exists…
Magic really is a get out of jail free card to authors, as it can be anything as needed.
I tend to enjoy the fantasy magic systems with real hard limitations built in as they end up far more interesting.
(Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series is a good example, with magic being powered only by burning metal the user has eaten)
Anything by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. I just can’t. Their smug, self-congratulatory, nod-and-a-wink man-splainy positioning is just insufferable. It’s like they are trying desperately to be Kurt Vonnegut and failing.
From the HP wiki. Don’t know how canon this is, I have only read the first few books:
Until the nineteenth century, broomsticks were of varying quality, although the invention of the Cushioning Charm in 1820 by Elliot Smethwyck greatly enhanced the quality and comfort of the rides.
Did something happen to him? I’m a great fan of his, saw him do a reading once in the early '80s, found it surprisingly compelling. “No Maps for these Territories” is a film worth seeing if you like Gibson; it features him riding across North America in the back of a limo, talking and smoking (did I oversell it? )
The Puccini opera? Certainly. I can’t imagine the book by itself kept its cultural influence more than 30 years or so. I don’t know how you would go about measuring that.
Joyce is simply a literary joke that got taken seriously and everyone is making too much money off it to admit they are in on the joke.
I’d add Ben Hur, the novel by Lew Wallace. Turgid even for Victorian prose, it is nigh unreadable unless you are a complete slave to that odd brand of late nineteenth century Christianity that was all too common.
Amass a sufficient corpus of popular periodicals, and compare hits on Loti’s novel to those on Puccini’s opera.
Or, sometimes the “canon” turns out to be a literal thing, and you can track the influence of certain authors by tracking their inclusion and exclusion from bourgeois libraries.
You’re making the literary equivalent of St. Augustine’s prayer, “Lord, let me believe in magic, just not too much.”
It’s fiction. It’s a series of constructs created in a writer’s head to advance a plot that more than likely the writer has already arrived at. To give it some a small dose of reality does nothing to change the fact it’s still a device of convenience.
Most of John Irving after Garp. A Prayer for Owen Meany drove me up the wall. I can read Garcia Marquez and enjoy it (mainly because it’s so beautifully written), but Irving and Rushdie’s take on Magical Realism makes me want to scream.
I must strenuously disagree. Unlimited magic systems are squishy and annoying to me. If you like your fiction to be dream like, where there is no defined reality and anything and everything can and does change randomly then have fun. I prefer fiction with defined worlds and rules - then the author gets to be creative within the boundaries they have created. Unlimited magic systems are boring for many of the same reasons god-mode Mary Sues are boring.
Honestly, I didn’t even get that far into the killing everyone off before I deleted it from my Kindle and moved on. When the author moved his Hillary Clinton parody on to the ISS, I gave up because I could see his smug screed taking shape.
I admit I never really liked any of the author’s books. Snow Crash was best read as a comedic take on cyberpunk, REAMDE was mildly interesting, but his essays, oh man, he was smug as hell, for example about how Linux was oh so superior and now only dweebs use Macs.
Yeah, that is spot-on. I loved Snow Crash, but it really needs to be read as tongue-in-cheek to work. The Diamond Age got too serious and that seriousness was detrimental (though I still enjoyed the book as a whole, even while shaking my head every couple pages).
