harry potter and the order of the phoenix read online

#Harry potter and the order of the phoenix read online series
#Harry potter and the order of the phoenix read online tv

Le Guin writes seriously Rowling writes just the way an 11-year-old would ideally like to write. All children's authors have to take their worlds immensely seriously, and that is about all that Rowling and Le Guin have in common, once you have noted the superficial similarities. But reading this book has made me now realise that the comparison is specious - the two authors are barely involved in the same process at all.

#Harry potter and the order of the phoenix read online series

Although my heart does go out to all those parents who will be obliged to read the book aloud, Phoenix can be raced through fairly quickly by the solitary reader, which is itself a testament to the fluency of Rowling's narrative.Īs for 'mumsy and artless' - that was my line, in this paper, when I compared Rowling unfavourably with Ursula Le Guin, who also wrote a series of books beginning with a young would-be adept being sent to wizard school in order for him to enhance and discipline his power, and learn to confront his destiny. The book's prodigious size has proved an asset rather than a handicap. Rowling has not been asleep at the wheel in the three years since the last Potter novel, and I am pleased to report that she has not confused sheer length with inspiration. I can't imagine anyone who is already happy with Rowling's world being disappointed with its latest manifestation (quidditch has never done it for me, but the kids seem happy enough with it). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also delivers more of the same, a shade more grown up, with extra explanation of the back story. The target audience, semi-officially, is in the nine-to-12 age range, and on those terms, the books are infallible.

To complain about her, shall we say, conservative imagination, her somewhat stilted dialogue, or, as one critic cruelly put it, her 'mumsy and artless prose', is in a sense to miss the point. Still, much of the criticism levelled against Rowling does seem to fall under the heading 'category error'. And besides, what highbrow critic ever dismissed Wagner because of his use of magical elements? (' Tristan is rubbish because it has a love-potion in it. What would Walter Benjamin have had to say about it? Or Karl Kraus? That its popularity was a symptom of a mass regression to infancy, perhaps? It may constitute a desire for a temporary flight from adulthood, but that isn't exactly the same thing. It is a phenomenon that one struggles to imagine the more austere cultural critics commentating on without perplexity. One became used, long ago, to the spectacle of adults reading JK Rowling's work in all kinds of public places, unembarrassed about being seen immersing themselves in a world of spells.

#Harry potter and the order of the phoenix read online tv

So, is this a childish phenomenon or an adult one? One may be arrested, as I was, by the image, during a break in the TV coverage of a cricket match, of an MCC member about a third of the way through The Order of the Phoenix (this some 12 hours after the book's publication) but the truly extraordinary thing about it is that it is not all that extraordinary. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix