Sonntag, 22. Mai 2011

5) (a) book/s that you can read over and over again

I have to go with Harry Potter here. As a kid I used to read a lot of books over and over again, but I think the Harry Potter books are the only ones that I read more then twice after I turned 15 or something. I started reading Harry Potter pretty late, because at first everybody seemed to like it, which at that time automatically made me hate it and not read it. I got over this phase when I was 17, on vacation and ran out of books to read. Someone else had the 3rd and 4th book with them, so I read those and then slowly became obsessed with Harry Potter. I read all of them over and over again. When a new one came out I read all the books before it came out, then read the new book the day it came out and then all the books again to find little details which point to the events of the new books that I now knew. I think this is one of the reasons why I like the books so much: there are so many details, some meaningful and some meaningless and things are therefor less predictable than in a lot of books. The characters are very detailed, too. Sometimes, when you read a book, you get the feeling that the author only put thoughts into the main characters and the rest of them are just stereotypical people who fulfill a certain role. It's not like that at all with Harry Potter. All the characters, even the unimportant ones, have their little quirks. Another thing I really like about Harry Potter is, that it's a fantasy book in which there is no good and evil. Well, there is, Voldemort is the Villain and Harry is the hero, but he is far from being flawless and Voldemort is more complex than just pure evil, too. This goes for the other characters as well. Sometimes it's hard to decide if they belong to the good or the evil side and even über-heroes like Dumbledore have their weaknesses and their dark secrets.
The lack of this is something that bothers me a lot with most fantasy books. There is no good and evil people or creatures in this world (okay, we could argue about slugs. Slugs might be pure evil.) and I just don't like if books pretend that it is so. And before anyone starts talking about Nazis now: of course I think Hitler was a bad person and that the Nazi regime did really, really horrible things. But there was a background story for all of this - historical events, that lead to it. Germans weren't born evil Nazis. Hitler wasn't born an anti-Semitic asshole, hungry for power and fucked up in his mind. Germans even at that time weren't orcs, full of hatred and ready to kill about anyone.
And - to get back to Harry Potter - here the events and characters have background stories, too. Things (other then just magic) happened, to make people the way they are. I like that.

Keine Kommentare:

Kommentar veröffentlichen