My girlfriend bought me this whole series for my birthday because she saw me reading The Lord of the Rings...

My girlfriend bought me this whole series for my birthday because she saw me reading The Lord of the Rings. It's been about 2 months now and I have only read the first book and a half. How do I kindly tell her they are bad literature and in a way a woman who never reads will understand?

>the gift you bought me is horrible because your taste is horrible. there's nothing you can do about it now but i just thought you should know.
go give your girlfriend a hug you meanie

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

That said though, don't tell her.

It's a gift. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I haven't read Walt Whitman, but knowing his age and gender, I can make an educated guess that racism in some way seeped into his work. This does not make Walt Whitman a 'bad' person, nor does it make him personally culpable for racism in the abstract. Rather it's a reflection of the society he lived in, one in which racism proliferated freely and openly. We can admire and study the works of Whitman and others while simultaneously recognizing negative elements embedded within, and denounce those elements without denouncing the whole of the work or the person themselves.

Cheers, twenty-something college brat.

They're childrens books. They were cool when I was little. That's all. I really think you're overthinking it.

Based Bloom.

I can imagine a child enjoying this as I did when I was young, but when I got older and the final book came out I couldn't even be bothered to read it anymore (was perhaps 14 at the time, or 15?) because I understood that the books are basically plot driven and have very little aesthetic value sans world-building.

You can read for entertainment. Contrary to popular belief on this board, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the story of a book. Not everything you read needs literary merit.

I don't think many people who've read great classics can suddenly turn open a book by Rowling and feel the same fulfillment.

You can play shit games too, but if the mechanics are poor and annoying, you will end up getting irked instead of enjoying yourself.