<p>Awesome facebook group. Join.</p>
<p>Realistically would Yale be more like Hogwarts? Or Harvard?</p>
<p>(Not inclusive of She-who-must-not-be-named)</p>
<p>Eh, they're both excellent schools.</p>
<p><em>whispers</em> I still haven't read Harry Potter</p>
<p>Get with the program!</p>
<p>I think Yale being Gryffindor and Harvard being Slytherin is a more accurate portrayal. They're both Hogwarts, people.</p>
<p>Rowling can really write. You are missing a treat.</p>
<p>MIT is Slytherin. Harvard is Huffelpuff.</p>
<p>Tolkien could really write. And while we're at it.....</p>
<p>Chanakya could really write. Tacitus, Virgil, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Pope (Alexander), Arbuthnot, could all really write. Sir Newton could write. Joseph Heller could write. </p>
<p>Harry Potter/ Twilight, etc etc........are escapist drivel that were written for a disaffected and materialist generation. I hate them.</p>
<p>I don't like reading books that require me to look up every other word in the dictionary or read the sentences a million times to understand them. Anything I've read by Tolkien bored me, it's too wordy.</p>
<p>Started reading HP in high school and then got a bit bored, but I asked for the books for Christmas and will start as soon as I've finished the other 56,027 books I've started and haven't gotten round to finishing yet. Garr. I like the movies though, both HP and LOTR.</p>
<p>Has anyone read Northern Lights? It's my favourite!</p>
<p>^ Northern Lights by Nora Roberts?</p>
<p>No, by Philip Pullman. Personally, Tolkien, Rowling, and Pullman are all very good books.</p>
<p>Nope, by Phillip Pullman. It's the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials but works just as well as a standalone, I didn't like the 2nd and 3rd as much.</p>
<p>"Tolkien could really write."</p>
<p>No he couldn't. He could do lots of things, but his writing in The Lord Of The Rings is often atrocious. (The Hobbit, where he was consciously dumbing himself down, is much better written.)</p>
<p>Re-reading Tolkien as an adult out loud to my children was a huge disappointment. I had completely fallen in love with him when I was 11, read everything then published over the course of a couple months, then re-read them multiple times. When I actually had to read each word out loud, instead of letting my eyes skim over the boring parts, and when I already knew what was going to happen and what the mythology was, and I had time to think between chapters rather than going through it all in a rush -- well, there is lots of it that is turgid and pretentious as all get-out. LOTR is a great work of art, but not for the writing. (However, I will admit that Tolkien does battle scenes about as well as anybody.)</p>
<p>I think Rowling is a much better writer -- especially in the early books, before she got a little turgid herself, and before the burden of writing for everyone in the world got to her. Twilight . . . not so much, or at all. I've hardly read any of it, but my kids have and they assure me that I don't want to.</p>
<p>I'm not certain it's fair to compare Rowling or Tolkien to Virgil or Pushkin, or even Joseph Heller (who, yes, could write, but only one book; the others are near-unreadable).</p>
<p>Anyway, I think it's more like Yale is Hogwarts and Harvard is wherever Victor Krum went. Plenty of Slytherins at Yale, trust me. But really Hogwarts is Oxford and Cambridge, and in the Harry Potter fantasy world America (and Harvard and Yale alike) doesn't exist.</p>
<p>Re: Northern Lights. = The Golden Compass in the Western Hemisphere. Another English fantasy in which America basically doesn't exist. (It exists, barely, but is completely irrelevant.)</p>
<p>They say Annenberg, Harvard's freshmen dining hall, is the most similar to Hogwarts' dining hall</p>
<p>Woah woah, I really really really like the constructed languages Tolkien is responsible for. They're almost perfect to use as models for the phonological/orthographical changes that have occurred in Welsh, Breton, Celtic, and many other languages in the England - Germany area. (In the same way that the 'made up' PIE is useful to model Indo European languages in general)</p>
<p>The 'boring' parts of the LOTR series are in my mind exposition for the kickass parts of LOTR.</p>
<p>"...when I already knew what was going to happen and what the mythology was..."
But that's just it! Reading Tolkien for the first time beats the teeth out of reading Harry Potter for the first time.</p>
<p>If you're talking about "Catch - 22" being Heller's only good stuff, pick up "Something Happened".</p>
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<blockquote> <p>They say Annenberg, Harvard's freshmen dining hall, is the most similar to Hogwarts' dining hall <<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>Indeed it is:</p>
<p>I want to live in that room.</p>
<p>collegehopefull: "Something Happened" is what I was referring to when I said Heller's other books are unreadable. "God Knows" isn't that bad.</p>
<p>And, yes, I love Tolkien's invented languages, too. That's what he was, essentially: a linguistics-oriented expert on ancient Scandanavian languages.</p>
<p>hey guys, if we are talking a bit about sci-fi here - ever read Terry Pratchett's books?</p>
<p>I've read a few. Colour of Magic was humorous... my geeky cousin showed me that book. At first I thought it was going to be stupid, but Terry Pratchett is actually pretty funny.</p>
<p>No where NEAR carl hiaasen</p>
<p>Gah! I loved "Something Happened!" !</p>
<p><em>mumbles to self</em></p>
<p>We can agree to disagree.</p>