Thin gruel
A guy wrote a long piece in The New Statesman explaining how terrible JK Rowling is.
His smoking gun is that she…liked a tweet.
Tip Jar
A guy wrote a long piece in The New Statesman explaining how terrible JK Rowling is.
His smoking gun is that she…liked a tweet.
“She liked a post” and for that she must hang, or be tied to a millstone, or be pressed to suffocation. Was it a post about how delicious hot dogs are? Because if that’s the case, and it was by a far-right tweeter, then we must all denounce hot dogs (even the pure beef ones!) He doesn’t say what she liked so we must agree with this innuendo that it was something truly bad.
And she took a pen-name for her detective novels, because using her own name carries an indelible stamp, an association with YA novels of the Harry Potter sort. These are to be seen as separate. He’s doing too much psychoanalysis, here. It’s not an uncommon practice, or did he think that Lemony Snicket was a real author rather than a pseudonym for Daniel Handler?
Mike Haubrich: she also took a pen-name because she’s a mother herself, and didn’t want kids seeing her name, thinking “ooh, new Harry Potter” and settling down to read a blood-and-guts crime novel. As someone who read Roald Dahl’s My Uncle Oswald far too young, I think it was a very sensible move.
Well there’s also probably not having her name tied with various descriptions along the theme of “he’s staring at her breasts”… Definitely comes up a lot in the Strike novels…
Well it makes sense doesn’t it? Her tweets “triggered” hysterical reactionaries to respond with hysterical reactions. It’s just like she fired a gun so it’s all on her. Guilty as charged!
I’ve only read a few excerpts of the NS piece. I understand the thrust is that Rowling writes nasty novels because they deal with very nasty people. They are crime novels, with horrible people in them, as is natural in a crime novel, but they aren’t nasty in tone. Robin and Strike, the detectives, are sympathetic protagonists, and they do solve the crime. Patricia Highsmith is far nastier and her Ripley gets away with it.
Michel Houellebecq is an example of a very nasty novelist – very nihilistic and gleeful about evil.