You know what's great about Harry Potter?

[conuly]

When people caught on to the huge wait times between books (and now the series is ended, of course), they started publishing a whole heckuva lot of other kid and YA fantasy books, much of which is really good - and even the more obviously derivative (of HP, naturally) books are still pretty nifty.

You know what's bad about Harry Potter? All these books - especially the more obviously pandering ones - have titles along the lines of Namety Name and the Adjectivial Noun. As it's now been almost two years since DH was released, can we all move past that, guys?

(And can some of these books have Namety Name protagonists other than white guys? Seriously? I mean, I'm all for encouraging boys to read, and I know that society tends to discourage them from reading books about girls, cooties and all that, but really now!)

Comments

What's good about HP

[cesy]

Hear, hear!

(to both parts)

[catnip13.livejournal.com]

You have read Tamora Pierce's Alanna and the other Tortall books, right?

[conuly]

Years ago! Though I prefer her Circle of Magic books, tell the truth.

But her books fit into an entirely different set of formulas, none of which (except perhaps the "go away to school" group, which isn't set in stone) apply to the Namety Name books. Notice that none of hers are "Alanna Lastname and the Whole Crossdressing Thing" or "Daine Sarrassri and the Emperor Mage".

Mage, Firefox? You can't recognize mage as a word? In a word, you suck.

[catnip13.livejournal.com]

I loved Alanna, beyond all rationality and reason. And she stands up to rereads better than ANY other books that I loved as a teen. I really liked Daine. The Kel and Aly books didn't grab me so well. I'm enjoying Beka so far. I liked the first Circle quartet and the Empress one, but I could not get through the Circle Opens books at all.

[conuly]

Once I read Aly I close to dropped the others. Aly is just fun. But to each their own. You read the Beka Cooper books?

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Stephen King commented on that--after his book The Shining came out, there were a slew of books named the Gleaming, the this-ing, the that-ing, and he was vastly amused by this because the title was a last-minute change.

[conuly]

How long did it take to stop?

And oh god. Most of these books are series, so they'll keep using that title pattern until the series is over, and some of them are bound to spawn their own copycats... Yeesh.