Teaching, as I do, a younger set of students, I have encountered this already. It's quite dismaying as it was so helpful to be able to compare Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape when discussing flat versus round characters (I don't know what Forster would think, but it worked for me!), and suddenly last year it wasn't quite working anymore. As mentioned by rymenhild there is The Hunger Games (but, whatever else one might think of the relative merits of the two texts, THG is significantly more focused and less, well, baggy in a way that makes it less likely that it will be useful to teach any given literary concept one wants to deal with). I'm afraid that coming up it could be Divergent, which put me off enough that, unlike either THG or HP, I was unable to read past the first book.
Man, I still vividly remember when one of my best friends, exactly half a year older than I, turned 11 and I was just so jealous. That having been said, I have to agree with forochel that, as an adult, I'm not convinced I would wish having been an Old One on myself as a kid over and above being a HP-verse witch. It's actually a really difficult choice - going to Hogwarts would have been cool and not ultimately all that scary or threatening, but it wouldn't have added much metaphysical depth to life, and I might have just ended up being disappointed. Being an Old One would have given me Meaning, but it would have made everything so much more difficult and painful. . . .
I realized I didn't really believe in magic when I read High Wizardry at 11 (Dairine, of course, was also 11 when she became a wizard) and got to the part about "beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more," and I realized I'd felt that way my entire life and that there wasn't actually more. Possibly given the choice I'd rather wish my 11-year-old-self to have been a Diane Duane wizard above either of the other options; it seems like the best compromise.
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Date: 2014-09-25 06:08 am (UTC)Man, I still vividly remember when one of my best friends, exactly half a year older than I, turned 11 and I was just so jealous. That having been said, I have to agree with
I realized I didn't really believe in magic when I read High Wizardry at 11 (Dairine, of course, was also 11 when she became a wizard) and got to the part about "beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more," and I realized I'd felt that way my entire life and that there wasn't actually more. Possibly given the choice I'd rather wish my 11-year-old-self to have been a Diane Duane wizard above either of the other options; it seems like the best compromise.