Reading HP
Aug. 19th, 2002 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantI've been lazily following links at random, sampling HP slash stories from hither and yon. And I'd forgotten how difficult it was to get oriented in a new fandom.
At least when I first started reading Sentinel and due South (after a long period of hiding in the backwaters of Voyager slash and refusing to read anything else), I had the guidance of Torch's recommendations page, which I was already familiar with (nay, hopelessly devoted to), and which had enough dS stuff to keep me satisfied for quite some time before I strayed from it.
HP has a lot of recs pages. A metric ton of them. Not to mention recs blogs and recs lists. But if there's one that's as reliable and selective as Torch's, I haven't found it yet.
And dS list culture is fractured, but HP list culture is even worse.
It's not just looking for great stories that's difficult. I'm suffering from fandom vertigo. Which stories are serious and which ones are supposed to be taken for laughs? Which ideas are serious and which ones are just those odd little bits of private language that come about when good friends hang out together and talk about a common interest? Which WIPs are going to get finished eventually and which ones are generally known to be long abandoned?
It reminds me of one of my favorite books, Samuel Delany's Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand. There's a lovely scene in which Rat, a laborer who's had a kind of high-tech lobotomy, is given a glove that temporarily re-connects his synapses. He's riding across a desert in the back of a vehicle full of digital "books" which can be "read" in an instant by grasping them in the glove.
He reads one. He reads a second. He reads a third, and discovers that it alludes to both the first and the second. He reads a fourth and finds that it obviously influenced all the others. He reads the equivalent of an entire library and begins to feel that he has a detailed, three-dimensional understanding of the world of ideas, that he really understands ideas and the way they relate to each other.
Then he arrives at his destination, and the driver informs him that these books are all in an obscure corner of an obscure subject matter, now long abandoned by most major thinkers and of interest only to historians.
I've friended a bunch of unsuspecting HP writers in the last couple of days; if I show up on your Friend Of list and you don't know who I am, that's probably why. Just trying to map out the territory a little.
(I'm absolutely not leaving due South, by the way. Just branching out.)
At least when I first started reading Sentinel and due South (after a long period of hiding in the backwaters of Voyager slash and refusing to read anything else), I had the guidance of Torch's recommendations page, which I was already familiar with (nay, hopelessly devoted to), and which had enough dS stuff to keep me satisfied for quite some time before I strayed from it.
HP has a lot of recs pages. A metric ton of them. Not to mention recs blogs and recs lists. But if there's one that's as reliable and selective as Torch's, I haven't found it yet.
And dS list culture is fractured, but HP list culture is even worse.
It's not just looking for great stories that's difficult. I'm suffering from fandom vertigo. Which stories are serious and which ones are supposed to be taken for laughs? Which ideas are serious and which ones are just those odd little bits of private language that come about when good friends hang out together and talk about a common interest? Which WIPs are going to get finished eventually and which ones are generally known to be long abandoned?
It reminds me of one of my favorite books, Samuel Delany's Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand. There's a lovely scene in which Rat, a laborer who's had a kind of high-tech lobotomy, is given a glove that temporarily re-connects his synapses. He's riding across a desert in the back of a vehicle full of digital "books" which can be "read" in an instant by grasping them in the glove.
He reads one. He reads a second. He reads a third, and discovers that it alludes to both the first and the second. He reads a fourth and finds that it obviously influenced all the others. He reads the equivalent of an entire library and begins to feel that he has a detailed, three-dimensional understanding of the world of ideas, that he really understands ideas and the way they relate to each other.
Then he arrives at his destination, and the driver informs him that these books are all in an obscure corner of an obscure subject matter, now long abandoned by most major thinkers and of interest only to historians.
I've friended a bunch of unsuspecting HP writers in the last couple of days; if I show up on your Friend Of list and you don't know who I am, that's probably why. Just trying to map out the territory a little.
(I'm absolutely not leaving due South, by the way. Just branching out.)
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(no subject)
Date: 8/19/02 03:19 pm (UTC)If you figure it out, give me a heads up.
If you haven't already read through "Walking the Plank," go immediately and read everything there. Not all is wonderful, but it's at least all basically finished stuff, and much is above average.
Walking the Plank:
http://remembrall.slashcity.net/~telanu/plank/frames.html
(no subject)
Date: 8/19/02 03:42 pm (UTC)and. er. I have recs (http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=silviakundera&itemid=489967) (which need to be updated, and which also are probably different than the recs pages you'll find of long-time fandom participants) and I consider myself fairly picky... but hell, not saying you have to trust me. *g*
So far I've found these rec places pretty helpful:
http://www.rightthisway.net/cimorene/recs.html
http://www.sockiipress.org/~luthien/recs.html#harrypotter
most of the WIPs I've come across seemed abandoned other than --
The Mirror Of Maybe
Underwater Light
(those two I've heard are still very much active)
(no subject)
Date: 10/15/02 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/19/02 05:37 pm (UTC)I was looking at the Snape Fuh-Q Fest archive the other day, and thinking to myself, "I wonder how people actually get a real story out of a perverse pairing like Snape/Filch." And then I thought, "Good lord, when did I stop thinking of Snape/Harry as a perverse pairing?!" I think I'm hooked.
(no subject)
Date: 8/19/02 08:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/20/02 06:57 pm (UTC)I especially appreciate that you specify which stories are non-explicit -- that is to say, which stories I can get away with reading at work.
(no subject)
Date: 8/20/02 07:59 am (UTC)Check Kest's blog too -- she tends to pop HP recs in there on occasion.
(no subject)
Date: 8/20/02 07:02 pm (UTC)