NY Times (Penny Rants again)

[pennylin]

Hi all --

Feeling more coherent, I decided to check out some of the reviews of OoP.
The official NY Times OoP review is quite nice actually.  It's positive, but
not glowing, and overall a very fair assessment.  However, the Book Review
Editor, Charles McGrath, apparently feels the need to justify his decision
to create that silly Children's Bookseller List and remove all the HP books
from the main bestseller list once again.  He wrote a piece for yesterday's
Times, and in it he not only completely blasts Rowling's writing style and
talents but insults all of us, the adult fans.  The link is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22CLOSE.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=105
6391218-hfP/l4PUCkwrnBgX9D2evQ

You do have to register to access NY Times articles but it is free.  I will
hope that Heidi won't have a fit though if I invoke fair use just to give
you some snippets from the overall article.

" we received bundles of letters from outraged adults. They had read and
thoroughly enjoyed the Potter novels, these readers said, so how could we
ghettoize them as mere children's books? Weren't the Potter books far
superior to a lot of the stuff that regularly makes its way onto the fiction
list? Well, they had a point there. On the other hand, the outlandish claims
that were frequently made for Potter made you wonder whether some of these
people had ever read anything else."

"Eventually maybe even free enough to pick up another, more challenging kind
of book."

I plan to write a letter to the editor.  Again.  I was definitely one of the
outraged adults who sent them a letter 3 yrs ago.

Penny
(who considers herself reasonably well-read and really doesn't need this
sanctimonious twit to hurl insults at her reading habits just because his
assine decision is bound to come into question as people realize that the
series is not so easily classified as kiddie lit as he thought ...........)