What I'm reading right now is Alice Sebold's
The Lovely Bones.
The
first Potter book was good, as was
the second. Both were consumed rapidly -- Rowling has a Dickensian gift for incident and character, and the novels are very good, and just about everybody's right. They're worth reading. And if we're to have bestsellers these are the kinds of bestsellers we need to have.
All the same, that whole Muggles (and clearly Rowling
knows Dickens to the T, right? Muggles? Muggleton? The dreary city off
The Pickwick Papers?)/Wizard thing bothered me. Because obviously we're to side w/ the wizards -- because all the millions of people who read the books see themselves as wizards, project themselves as such, as of course did I. And not only are we all wizards, we're all wizards on the side of good. Everyone's a Griffindor, no one's a Slytherin. Which is fine -- except I think the literature that I tend to fall in love with is the kind where the characters we follow are a little Muggleish, a little
wrong, sometimes capable of Slytherinish acts. Because more often than not we're Muggles who strike up magic once in a while -- and we're far more likely to do so, become wizards however briefly, if more keenly aware of our Muggly nature.
So regardless I'm really liking Potter, and will be reading the third book as soon as I can, but I think they could be less thin. (And near the end there are intimations of thickness. Hints of complications. We'll see what happens.) I guess another way of putting what I'm trying to say is that on the Dickens scale that Potter falls more on the Oliver Twist side than on
the Pip side, and that I like the latter, find him more interesting, more than the former.
The Diagnosis was pretty good. I had not read Lightman before. Some passages creaked a bit (where information was sort of being given to reader so as to stop the reader from asking too many questions), but overall there was a great deal to like: precision, a nice coldness to some very baroque, surreal scenes, some clear-cut Kafkaesque bits that were simultaneously funny and horrifying. Yet the central idea -- external illness as a manifestation of 20th/21st century malaise -- felt a little worn.
