The great Harold Bloom said:
“Harry Potter” will not lead our children on to Kipling’s “Just So Stories” or his “Jungle Book.” It will not lead them to Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks” or Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows” or Lewis Carroll’s “Alice.”
That is highly debatable. A number of things can lead kids towards this book or that one—or even from
a book to book
s in general—and I see no reason whatsoever reading Harry Potter couldn't lead to reading, say, Alice. Anecdotal evidence of course, but I know two kids who read the first Harry Potter when they were around seven, and hereat their liking of reading was founded, leading soon after to them reading such classics as Le Petit Prince and Tartarin De Tarascon.
The great Harold Bloom said:
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex.
That on the other hand, I whole-heartedly agree with; and the phenomenon he speaks of has been long in the making. In a letter to Lovecraft dated December 1930, talking about one of his short stories and bemoaning a recurring theme in the rejections he (and Lovecraft, too) received from various magazine editors, Clark Ashton Smith wrote the following:
"The style—or lack of it—required by nearly all magazine editors, would require a separate treatise. The idea seems to be that everything should be phrased in a manner will obviate any mental effort on the part of the lowest grade moron. I was told the other day that my Door To Saturn could only be read with a dictionnary, and that I would sell more stories if I were to simplify my vocabulary."
Fast-forward to now, when using words like inchoate, bathybic, or coeval, will cause many people to go cross-eyed. Worse: I find a depressing number of people won't push past the slightest balk to their reading ability, and will drop the book then and there.
Lower than WoT you have only things like fanfics. And maybe Twilight - haven read that one.
Rhapsody – Symphony Of The Ages. Worst book I've ever read, and so by a huge margin (one might say gargantuesque margin; or gargamellian perhaps, the author being a woman). It's incredible, stepping firmly into the territory of
nanars, those movies so terrible they acquire a certain ineffable quality.
And the Amazon reviews thereof are funny; four- and five-stars review make for precisely 90% of their bulk, while the rest are readers baffled that this book was even published.
Y'all niggers are based.
