I was a bit “aged out the bracket” and my eldest is 6, so I can only go by the impression of discussions and me halfass avoiding the movies to say it feels like the Percy Jackson series was more like a retold fairytale that I didn’t care much for the first 10K iterations, and not a world rich and unto itself like Potter. I wouldn’t expect that to compete.
That being said, it will be more .y own opinion within the next 10 years, as my kids get old enough.
Nowhere did I say that people can’t read what they want. What I did say was that people should be less dismissive of older stories that break the mold in some way/feel less “modern” in sensibility, and I think the original context of this discussion was people ripping into books like Catcher in the Rye for being unlikable or otherwise bothersome.
Riordan’s value is that he is fun to read to your kid as a parent. In his better books (or his ghost writers, I dunno) he is incredibly funny and his takes on mythological figures is awesome. Asgard series are great and so are Kane’s chronicles.
He’s also really good at balancing descriptions, dialogue and action.
HP is… far, far less entertaining.
I do. I call mass media designed very poorly and mindlessly yet geared toward men Dick Flicks and Dick Lit, harkening back to "you compensating for something?’ I’ve never been one to be mild about it or take offense. Done so for about 20 years and most guys who are used to me will use that phrase and laugh because they see it as apt.
So he’s better to start with when they are younger, and HP is better when we’re gearing up to soldier through Tom Bombadill. I’ll keep that in mind.
What stands out to me with something like Harry Potter is that those books are relatively old, and yet younger kids are still reading them. Parents who read the books as kids can now have their children read them (the last book came out in 2007, so if you read them in your teens and had a child young, they could be reading them as younger teenagers now).
I meant stop, not start. Lol. Anyway, I have to work for my living now.
But as someone who read Catcher, Dune and Riordan, I would say that Dune is way, way weak in comparison for reader’s engagement.
My kids are contemporary to my youngest brother’s kids, Middle’s are older by over a decade. So, 1st gen read is baby brother, not read to his kids yet, parallel reading is Middle brother and his teens, and me, just going wtf half the day.
I think it’s generational. I read it to my kid without reading it myself as a kid and I didn’t like it. Neither did she remember it fondly. She was all into Riordan and Artemis Fowl, not HP. That’s despite her being born after the movies. She didn’t even re-watch them all that often. Instead, she veered very hard into anime once she started picking her own stuff to read. And the crap they make her read at school… holy cow. It’s really crap.
I read the 1st Dune around the same age as Tolkien and Stoker…so I don’t remember much of reading it. Only part that I found fascinating enough to stick with me was the little girl and things surrounding how she thinks. I remember sleeping through the movie more.
I remember mostly thinking, he’s such a pretentious jerk from a family of pretentious jerks all book long. And the drops of Russian words just pissed me off.
…and then Robert Jordan boarded the same train too of ‘powerful’ women as imagined by a man. And, like everything Jordan did, he did it in an order of magnitude quantity…
I liked the concept and if someone would abridge a movie I’d love it more, but if I wanted a “masculine scifi” it would be reading Old Man’s War for a light read and Starship Troopers for something I have to sit and think through. Most authors I read regularly are female, in scifi.
For the record, I haven’t actually read Dune. But there are so many books out there and there’s only so much time. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, and the sci-fi I tend to read is more speculative short stories rather than hundred-page epics of people shooting each other with space lasers.
Dune is actually deeply philosophical take on climate change and political satire etc. It has pages of introspection (rendered in the old movie in whispering, dramatic tones) If there was sci-fi that was you, it would be Dune. Or, maybe, like really, really old stuff like Heinlein. I dunno, never read Heinlein
There are always things that are borderline, like the Ender’s Game series. It questions what life actually is, to some degree.
Actually, now I am thinking about it, I need to read damn Twilight. I know that Hunger Wars are not for me, but maybe I will gain some insight from Twilight.
I couldn’t get through the first chapter without going full-on snooty. Good luck.
Well, I am dragging myself through Chandler’s novelettes, so it will be a while till I am done with that. Here’s one example of someone who wanted to be edgy and hard-boiled, and 50 years later he’s basically impossible to understand without efforts. And, zero efforts to emotionally connect the protagonist to the reader.
Probably, will be a great contrast, since Twilight is prob all emo.
Outside Starship Troopers, I think the only other things of his I’ve read is Columbus was a Dope and Skylight.