Favorite Books and Current Reads

[Kitsunexus]

[Riseatrance]

[Archaic Sage]

Bah, I read that article, what a lot of crap. It helps before you write an article bashing someone to actually research what you're writing about. The Legend of Rah and the Muggles by Nancy K. Stouffer was thrown out of court for being not only fraudulent in nature, but too far removed to actually be the same as Rowling's work .

With the entire Vander Ark mess, Steve owns the HP Lexicon, which simply put, is the timeline of the HP series and is an encyclopaedia for HP. Which is cool, Rowling has admitted to going onto the website, which makes no money and she doesn't mind that it exists. Vander Ark has previously contacted Rowling to see if he can get the works published, or to work for her, and her lawyers said no on all occasions.

He's then approached by a small publishing company in the States who say it's OK to do this, and in e-mail communication he asks if it'll be legal as he'll be making money out of it - which the company says it's OK. Which it isn't.

If you're writing an essay for your major, and you literally just lift the words from someone else's essay and just change the arrangement of it, doesn't make it your essay. That's exactly what the Lexicon is, and that's what it will be in the book (if it makes it to publication). Unlike many other HP companion books, there's literary critique and citation, I've got one HP companion book from about 2002 and it has citation throughout the book and goes in-depth into some of the, possible, meanings of the names and titles of the books released to then.

Suing Vander Ark is the right thing to do, purely because he's just put someone else's words onto a website and thinks he can publish it. It'd be like us getting hold of Lord of the Rings and then just taking huge passages of text out of it, and then not citing our source and trying to publish it. Plagiarism.

There's a summary of the days in court, and .

It takes seconds for people to write a rant, and it'll be making them look like twats for years afterwards if they don't research it correctly.

[Riseatrance]

[Archaic Sage]

[Hobbun]

[Kaining]

[Archaic Sage]

[Maxine MagicFox]

[Kaining]

[Seniwac]

[Kinokokao]

Extant -
Hey, you saved me the trouble of linking to it! Thanks ^_^

Yeah, OSC's rant is really well put together.

Much fun as it'd be to twist this into a Rowling-bashing, I'm just going to say that nothing I've ever read of her in interviews changes my opinion.
Again, I'm not saying the books are bad. I LOVE the Harry Potter books. I read the last book in a single sitting, then promptly started from book one and worked by way back up to 7. I've seen all the movies in theater even though I haven't liked them.
I'm just saying Rowling's a frigid greedy bitch. That's all.

Anyway.

Right now I'm reading "Diary of a Job Search" and "The Princeton Review's Best Entry-Level Jobs"
-_-;
Ugh.

ETA: Holy crap! Like 15 thousand people posted while I was writing this!

[Teclo]

Archaic Sage: I don't want to just disregard the passion you seem to feel for the HP series or for Rowling's ability to create, but the world she "created" was just the typical "Magical Boarding School" found in countless kids' book in the past hundred years or two. The characters are the typical archetypes and even little characterful touches, like the sweets that have bizarre flavours, are straight out of an Enid Blyton book such as The Magic Faraway Tree.

If things like her writing some coherent family trees earns your respect, I think you should put it in context: For his Middle Earth books, Tolkien wrote dozens of family trees going back hundreds of years, he wrote the history of his world since its creation, spanning four ages, he invented several fully functioning languages, all with grammar systems and all with an interplay between them that suggests they evolved from each other like real languages. He even explains why certain areas/people use certain languages by discussing who would trade with who or who migrated where, etc.

To give her credit, if it was easy as just ripping off older kids' books, everyone would be doing it and would be millionaires by now. There's obviously a knack to it, just like how GTA gets insulted by "hardcore gamers" for just being a glitchy sandbox game where you just run around blowing stuff up, but when you look at it you see it's a hard thing to do and get right; anyone else who's tried has fallen short by a considerable length.

I'd say with the popularity of things, though, that there's a sort of Event Horizon (Wiki it if you don't know what that is, but since this is the internet I bet most people do) where once something gets to a certain level of popularity it just snowballs and its popularity accelerates beyond any good reason - because at that "Event Horizon point" everyone knows at least one person who likes it, so they give in and read one of the books, and then someone else sees them reading it and thinks "I may as well try them out" and so on and so on.

[Kitsunexus]

[Archaic Sage]