Harry Potter's Bookshelf Quotes

“Ms. Rowling has said she read Austen’s Emma “at least twenty times” and that she “rereads Austen’s novels in rotation.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Traditional school stories feature the hero (or heroine) and his (or her) best friend. A third companion commonly joins them, corresponding to the “rule of three“ policy that historically operated in many boarding schools.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Frequently found among the hero’s friends in classic school stories is a pair of identical twins, often practical jokers whose activities provide both comic relief and confusion that gets sorted out at the end.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The third person limited omniscient view is not just another way of telling a story; it is the view we too-human readers have of the world, as unconscious as we are of our own pride and prejudices.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“We think we’re seeing everything because Emma isn’t telling us the story, but what we’re not seeing—namely, what is happening outside of Emma’s view or of her understanding—is, alas, where the real story is happening.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The fundamental and most practical point of influence between Rowling and Austen is the perspective in which the Harry Potter novels are told and how this perspective lulls the passive reader into traveling down the erring path (and far away from the solution of the mystery).”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The first five Harry Potter novels end in almost identical fashion. Before the trip to King’s Cross Station on the Hogwarts Express, Harry does battle underground with an agent of the Dark Lord Voldemort himself, dies a figurative death, is saved by a symbol of Christ, and learns from Albus Dumbledore what really happened in that year’s adventure.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Drive is what gets us hooked and keeps those pages turning. The insoluble mystery that awakens our desire for revelation and resolution as well as our sense of injustice, combined with the ease and surety that an orphan novel uses to win our identification with and interest in a sympathetic character, is a story that acts as a conveyor belt in overdrive.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“choosing to tell the story in the “third person limited omniscient” view—sitting on a character’s shoulder and sharing his or her perspective—fosters sympathy. Another way to grab the reader by the heart is to trigger the trip wire tied to the reader’s sense of fairness or justice. This is the “gotcha” of mystery writing, truth be told. When presented with a crime and a messy set of clues, not to mention the stray corpse or two, our conscience flashes a red light, especially if there is someone unjustly accused or a murderer escaping without punishment. I don’t know if we are hardwired this way (I suspect we are) or if this is a conditioned response from childhood training. Whatever the cause, it’s a rare reader who doesn’t want to have the pieces to the puzzle assembled and justice served for the innocent and the guilty. Who won’t read to the very end to learn the solution and hear the confession of the bad guy? Take this one step further and you have Rocky (the boxer, not the squirrel).”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“They won’t care how much you know ’til they know how much you care.” It’s true in the classroom and on the playing field with high-school age students, certainly, but it also is something of a guideline for writers. Until the reader cares about the characters”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Earth and fairy-land coexist upon the same foot of ground. It was all a matter of the seeing eye . . . The dweller in this world can become aware of an existence on a totally different plane. To go from Earth to faery is like passing from this time to eternity; it is not a journey in space, but a change in mental outlook.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“insoluble problem is set, the narrator presents the clues, the detective resolves the mystery, the criminal is confronted in a dramatic denouement, and the moral order returns to one degree or another.4 The essential part of this formula with respect to its ability to keep us turning pages, however, doesn’t involve the players or the murder. It is our confusion. We are engaged first and foremost by the mystery involved,”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“it does hold to the narrative drive elements of a good mystery well told. Those elements are reader mystification, the detection of cause, and restoration of order.3”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“A crime is committed. An investigator seeks out the truth. The truth is revealed.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Her books are a gathering together of schoolboy stories, hero’s journey epics, alchemical drama, manners-and-morals fiction, satire, gothic romance, detective mysteries, adventure tales, coming-of-age novels, and Christian fantasy.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The model I’ve chosen is what Northrop Frye called the iconological school of literary criticism. In a nutshell, we’ll be looking at Harry Potter as a text like all great art with four layers of meaning: the surface, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical or spiritual.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Yeats is supposed to have said that education is lighting a fire not filling a bucket; the model and thesis of Bookshelf are kindling for the fire rather than just more information for your cranial data files.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures