Practical problems with various books

[conuly]

People tell me I'm too literal when reading books, that I should ignore the problems in literature and just enjoy the story. I'm not sure what this means, or how I can enjoy a story that's riddled with holes (or why they think nitpicking isn't fun...), but I just now thought that listing various problems in certain books might be fun.

Harry Potter Series

1. At the start of book 1, Hagrid tells Harry that no wizard ever went bad who wasn't from Slytherin. Even if he didn't know about Sirius Black (unlikely, but let's pretend), how could he discount all the other wizarding schools in the world? Is this hyperbole?

2. Even more pressing, Hagrid is described in book 2 as trying to raise werewolf cubs... but Lupin was a werewolf, and he evidently wasn't a cub of any sort.

3. Okay, the Ministry of Magic can spot all sorts of wrongful magic use in kids. Why can't it spot Hagrid's magic-using, or track down all those unregistered animagi?

4. Hogwarts isn't an elite academy, it's a trade school. The Wizarding world has journalists, where do they learn to write well? For that matter, where are younger wizards educated? Don't they learn any magic before the age of 11? What if they go through school and then decide that they really want to be physicists (maybe they were muggle-born)? What do they do then?

The Giver

1. I've worked this out as often as possible, and I still don't see how Jonas' community survived more than a few generations. If no two people from each year have the same job (as is implied when he turns 12), and each birthmother only has three children... how do they keep a steady 50 children each year? They'd need to have 16 or 17 birthmothers yearly!

2. Each community has its own teachers, and elders, and whatnot. Does each community also have it's own receiver of memories? This isn't a practical problem, just a question.

3. Why did Jonas run away? Why not just tell the truth: "If you kill Gabriel, you'll be inundated with memories"? Or say something like "If you kill Gabriel, I'll stop training immediately, you can't force me, and I might even kill myself". They wouldn't ignore a threat like that. Why didn't he even go to the giver for help?

4. Where'd the sled come from. We know he didn't die (sorry for the spoiler, but she wrote two more books involving Jonas, one of which directly names him), so how did it get there?

The Girl who Owned a City

1. Only one complaint. This plague killed everybody over the age of 12, and nobody under. That's just not possible. It's more likely to get a plague that kills everybody who has passed puberty, so some would die as young as 10, some as late as 18, and some wouldn't be affected, having not gone through puberty for one reason or another.

The Babysitters/Sweet Valley series

1. HOW MANY BIRTHDAYS DID THEY HAVE, AND STILL NOT AGE????

The Chrestomanci Books

1. In the Lives of Christopher Chant, they decide to bring more children to the castle to be educated. But in Charmed Life, there's only Chrestomanci's kids and, later, their cousins. What happened to their plan?

The Foundation Series

1. How does psychohistory work?

2. More reasonably, since it's unfair to attack the basis of the books, how is it possible that everybody speaks the same language? Even with a LOT of varying dialects, after 30,000 years they should be more incomprehensible to each other than they are. And not everybody on a planet should speak the same way.

There's no doubt more, but that's all I could think of off the top of my head.

Comments

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Re: comment 2 on the Foundation series. You have only this one planet to judge from, so it's possible other planets only have one language, isn't it? You don't know! (Or if you do, share!) In scifi planets often have one language if they were colonized by one people, and if a society has the means to colonize a planet, they probably also have a method for near-instantaneous communication, and that would maintain the one language. But that's a bit of an aside.

[conuly]

It's possible, but unlikely. We don't even speak the same dialect in any one country! New York City has three distinct accents!

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Different dialects, of course, naturally. But still ultimately the same language. The accent may be thick, but with effort you can understand. Well, okay.. I can't understand some New Yorkers.. but I blame a lack on my own part. ^_~

[conuly]

Yes, but this is within one country. There are several distinct language families. Each language family has many languages which aren't mutually intelligible. Why should the galaxy only have one language, after 30 thousand years?

[deceptica]

Well, I haven't read the Foundation series, but I don't think the idea of there being only one language is that far-fetched. As it is, we have a huge number of different languages on our own planet, but scientist believe that already within the next hundred years 75%-90% of those languages will have died out. So I don't find the idea of evolution towards a single language that strange...

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

I don't really remember the Foundation books, yeah. A whole galaxy of the same languange is probably too much, but then, we've never tried, hee. As simultaneous communication evolves, perhaps one main language does, too.

Also, English is nearly a standard language here; perhaps in a galaxy-spanning civilization, they would all speak different languages, but they would all also learn Basic or Common or Spacetalk. Somethin'.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Foundation books, but I've wondered this myself in sci-fi settings. Then I realized.

Everyone has instantaneous conversations no matter where you are in the galaxy (in most science fiction works). It's worked much like the internet in meshing ideas and closing language barriers. Imagine everyone having to learn the same language (Orson Scott Card's Stark, for example) and then using that language with everyone else irregardless of their physical location. The language might change over time, but any changes made to the language in say, Tokyo, would be instantly received in New York.

That's making a big assumption on the basis of the book, but I just wanted to offer some insight. ^^ (I'm doing a sci-fi book and I came across this problem-- everyone speaks a mixture of Japanese, English and Common, with regional languages being secondary).

[conuly]

But that's not what happens in the Foundation series. If it were, you'd have a lot of complaints about having to learn Galactic Standard in school, not a lot of complaints about how in some areas, the dialect is very hard to understand.

Re: The Harry Potter Series

[deceptica]

1. Yes, it's hyperbole, simple as that. It's not so much about Hagrid trying to give the facts about Slytherin as about him expressing his low opinion of them.

2. I can't be bothered to look this one up in the book... but who describes Hagrid like that? If it's another character, they simply might not know all the facts about Werewolves. If it's the author who described him like that... hmmm. I'd think Lupin was never a cub because he wasn't bitten as a baby as far as I remember. However, I don't think there's anything that speaks against Werewolves having kids/cubs themselves.

3. Well, they simply aren't perfect. Just like the police catches some criminals and not others, the Ministry also can't know about everything. Though I agree that it's sometimes a bit strange how they spot some things and not others.

4. I think I read somewhere that Rowling said that before the age of eleven, wizard children can either go to Muggle schools or get home-schooled by their parents.
I'm not sure I really understand your problem with wizards who'd like to become journalists... they'd simply have to go into higher education? In the Muggle world you generally don't learn any really job-specific skills in high school either.
As for wizards wanting to become physicists... I guess that's a good question. I would assume that it probably doesn't happen often, I mean how many wizards would like to completely give up magic again? (I mean, they wouldn't be allowed to use it if they working with Muggles all they time, would they?)

Re: The Harry Potter Series

[conuly]

It was Riddle. It seemed like he was giving facts about Hagrid, including one incident where he tried to raise werewolf cubs.

I'm not sure I really understand your problem with wizards who'd like to become journalists... they'd simply have to go into higher education?

When I went to high school, I learned (theoretically) about writing essays, and doing advanced math, and so on. It seems that these skills would also be basic in magic, wouldn't they? But they aren't covered at all at Hogwarts, really.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Re: comment 2 on the Foundation series. You have only this one planet to judge from, so it's possible other planets only have one language, isn't it? You don't know! (Or if you do, share!) In scifi planets often have one language if they were colonized by one people, and if a society has the means to colonize a planet, they probably also have a method for near-instantaneous communication, and that would maintain the one language. But that's a bit of an aside.

[conuly]

It's possible, but unlikely. We don't even speak the same dialect in any one country! New York City has three distinct accents!

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Different dialects, of course, naturally. But still ultimately the same language. The accent may be thick, but with effort you can understand. Well, okay.. I can't understand some New Yorkers.. but I blame a lack on my own part. ^_~

[conuly]

Yes, but this is within one country. There are several distinct language families. Each language family has many languages which aren't mutually intelligible. Why should the galaxy only have one language, after 30 thousand years?

[deceptica]

Well, I haven't read the Foundation series, but I don't think the idea of there being only one language is that far-fetched. As it is, we have a huge number of different languages on our own planet, but scientist believe that already within the next hundred years 75%-90% of those languages will have died out. So I don't find the idea of evolution towards a single language that strange...

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

I don't really remember the Foundation books, yeah. A whole galaxy of the same languange is probably too much, but then, we've never tried, hee. As simultaneous communication evolves, perhaps one main language does, too.

Also, English is nearly a standard language here; perhaps in a galaxy-spanning civilization, they would all speak different languages, but they would all also learn Basic or Common or Spacetalk. Somethin'.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Foundation books, but I've wondered this myself in sci-fi settings. Then I realized.

Everyone has instantaneous conversations no matter where you are in the galaxy (in most science fiction works). It's worked much like the internet in meshing ideas and closing language barriers. Imagine everyone having to learn the same language (Orson Scott Card's Stark, for example) and then using that language with everyone else irregardless of their physical location. The language might change over time, but any changes made to the language in say, Tokyo, would be instantly received in New York.

That's making a big assumption on the basis of the book, but I just wanted to offer some insight. ^^ (I'm doing a sci-fi book and I came across this problem-- everyone speaks a mixture of Japanese, English and Common, with regional languages being secondary).

[conuly]

But that's not what happens in the Foundation series. If it were, you'd have a lot of complaints about having to learn Galactic Standard in school, not a lot of complaints about how in some areas, the dialect is very hard to understand.

Re: The Harry Potter Series

[deceptica]

1. Yes, it's hyperbole, simple as that. It's not so much about Hagrid trying to give the facts about Slytherin as about him expressing his low opinion of them.

2. I can't be bothered to look this one up in the book... but who describes Hagrid like that? If it's another character, they simply might not know all the facts about Werewolves. If it's the author who described him like that... hmmm. I'd think Lupin was never a cub because he wasn't bitten as a baby as far as I remember. However, I don't think there's anything that speaks against Werewolves having kids/cubs themselves.

3. Well, they simply aren't perfect. Just like the police catches some criminals and not others, the Ministry also can't know about everything. Though I agree that it's sometimes a bit strange how they spot some things and not others.

4. I think I read somewhere that Rowling said that before the age of eleven, wizard children can either go to Muggle schools or get home-schooled by their parents.
I'm not sure I really understand your problem with wizards who'd like to become journalists... they'd simply have to go into higher education? In the Muggle world you generally don't learn any really job-specific skills in high school either.
As for wizards wanting to become physicists... I guess that's a good question. I would assume that it probably doesn't happen often, I mean how many wizards would like to completely give up magic again? (I mean, they wouldn't be allowed to use it if they working with Muggles all they time, would they?)

Re: The Harry Potter Series

[conuly]

It was Riddle. It seemed like he was giving facts about Hagrid, including one incident where he tried to raise werewolf cubs.

I'm not sure I really understand your problem with wizards who'd like to become journalists... they'd simply have to go into higher education?

When I went to high school, I learned (theoretically) about writing essays, and doing advanced math, and so on. It seems that these skills would also be basic in magic, wouldn't they? But they aren't covered at all at Hogwarts, really.