Ordinary Bookclub: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Chapters 1-5)
Okay. So we’ve read the first five chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Chapter 1: Where we find out that this universe’s Harry Potter has an aunt Petunia who, instead of marrying Vernon Dursley talked (berated, threatened) her sister Lily into getting her a Beauty Potion. This beauty potion opened doors and Petunia married, instead, an Oxford Professor who loves science and, yes, rationality. And if you get a letter from Hogwarts when your step-parents are venial and stupid, that’s one thing. But if you get one when your step-dad is an Oxford professor, that’s quite another. I mean, seriously. If YOU got a letter from Hogwarts when you were 11, your parents would have known it was a practical joke and, depending on how excited you were to hear about it, they’d have opinions on how cruel or tasteless a joke it was. Well, so too with Harry’s dad.
Chapter 2: We establish that magic exists to the satisfaction of Harry’s dad. Also, we establish that magic is weird.
Chapter 3: We visit the shoppes of Diagon Alley and we see Harry learn about the fate of his genetic parents. Oh, and we meet Professor Quirrell.
Chapter 4: We visit Gringotts. If there are there are 17 Sickles in a Galleon, and 29 Knuts in a Sickle, then there are 493 Knuts to a Galleon. We learn that Harry has a LOT of Galleons.
Chapter 5: We get a bag of holding and figure out how it works. We see people meet Harry Potter for the first time and they thank him for what he did… and we see Harry get irritated at their committing of the Fundamental Attribution Error Fallacy. Then we go get Harry some robes and, looky there, we have our first meeting with Draco!
And that’s our first five chapters.
Next Sunday, we’ll cover chapters 6-10 which should take us all the way up to the scene with the Sorting Hat (unless people agitate for more chapters to be read for our little weekly sessions in the comments).
So… What do you think?
(Featured image is Foucault’s Pendulum by Sylvar. Used under a creative commons license.)
About the most glaring problem with HPMOR is that Harry speaks like an American. Its subtle and a bit difficult to point out. But once you notice it, you can’t unsee it.Report
I saw a note on the website that there was an ongoing process of embritishening the dialogue, which has by now covered the first dozen or so chapters. But still I agree with your assessment – even if they’ve rooted out garbage cans and pants in favour of dustbins and trousers, there’s still an underlying Americanness to Harry’s lines.
Which I can somewhat explain away by saying he worships Richard Feynmann, so as he models his thought on Feynmann’s lectures and books, he’s unconsciously taking on some of Feynmann’s American habits of speech too.Report
I did not notice that when I read through it… but, yes. I can see how I would not have noticed Harry having a significantly different cultural voice because the point of the fiction is to change Harry’s intellectual voice and, since I share the cultural voice with the writer, the cultural change was transparent to me.
(But it wouldn’t have been transparent to someone from a culture that isn’t either American or British.)
As such, I can totally see how this would be a problem for others.Report
Yeah, the Americanism are a bit distracting.Report
Didn’t read the fanfic but one thing that Rowling never really explained was how Muggle born children got into Hogwarts. We know they received the letter but most muggle parents would have no idea about magic and would see the entire thing as a cruel joke played on young children. Even if they accepted the idea of magic in theory, they might not like the idea of sending ten year old kids off to boarding school, especially one that didn’t have much of a real world curriculum.Report
If they didn’t hear one way or the other, I assume they sent Hagrid to the kid’s house.
(Also: You should read the fic. Chapter Two touches on the point you just made.)Report
I really enjoyed what I’ve read so far. The flattery sequence in 5 was hilarious.
I am pretty ambivalent about Harry Potter, especially the later books. I read my daughter up to the goblet of fire as bedtime stories, and I’m stopping there. There’s certainly some fun stuff in there, but I found they weren’t enough to carry the slow pacing.
HPMOR seems so far to keep a quick pace more like the earlier books, so I’m having an easier time forgiving whatever flaws I run into.
Harry Potter being an unlikeable character in HPMOR, as some folks remarked on in the announcement thread, isn’t that much of a departure for me – I don’t find Harry likeable in the original series either. But (spoiler?) By the end of chapter 7 I was sure surprised – like, he’s not just kind of white bread unsympathetic, what the heck is he up to here?
I downloaded the first five chapters to read on my phone on the flight from Sao Paulo to Toronto, and quickly found myself wishing I had more to read. Grabbed 6-8 for Toronto-Edmonton and again for myself wishing I’d grabbed more (though I was pretty dazed – end up reading 4 & 5 in reverse order, and not realising until later that I’d skipped 7).Report
I’m pleased that you enjoyed it! (And, if you ask me, the pacing remains quick the entire story. There might be one or two relatively slower chapters but they tend to come as a relief.)
As for unlikability, oh my goodness yes. He has not even *BEGUN* to be unlikable. Oh, goodness. The parts in the middle…Report
The flattery section is one of my favourites.Report
To download fanfic for offline reading, the best thing to do is to get the epub of the entire thing instead of doing it piecemeal
There’s an epub link provided on hpmor.com if you scroll down a bit, and also Calibre can make one from the fanfiction.net version.Report
>I read my daughter up to the goblet of fire as bedtime stories, and I’m stopping there
For what it’s worth, I think that Goblet is the consensus low point in the series. It might be worth pushing through the next book. (Then again, maybe not.) I certainly did enjoy the original series, but now that you’ve been exposed to HPMOR, you might find the flaws in the original too distracting to like those books in the same wayReport
There are two great scenes in these couple of chapters
1 When Professor McGonagall turns into a cat, destroying Harry’s carefully constructed world of physical laws
2 When Harry and Professor McGonagall discuss abused children
The first of the two scenes is not only funny, but quickly put magic in perspective. Magic, we assume, is “natural”. It exists in the same universe we do. It’s just physics we still don’t understand. Harry realizes in shock that this is wrong: magic contradicts all the physics we know. All his understanding of the world goes out of the window.
The second is a conversation that I wish came out every time we talk about abuse. We cannot prove a negative. No one can. Hence we need to be extremely careful about how we talk about it. Once you start, there’s no way back. Agatha Christie once said that murder affects everything and everyone, not just the criminal and the victim. This is similar, and this very short conversation between Professor McGonnagal and Harry clearly shines a bright light on it.Report
I like the conversation #2, and the flip side to that conversation that comes up a couple of chapters later.
I didn’t notice that they were probably deliberately placed close together until just now.Report
One of my favorite scenes from the cat chapter happened at the beginning where Harry’s dad said “Huh.”
(This probably ties into Murali’s criticism of the story.)Report
Naturally the arbitrage scene piqued my interest, but then the wizarding world break so many physical laws, why not the Law of One Price as well?
As an aside, one of the reasons I assume goblin coin is so dominant is that apparently goblins have a way of making their coins magically durable, as pure gold is too soft to be used for coins.Report
Also, one may presume it (somehow) can’t be counterfeited. Like, there’s something wizards can do to confirm a coin was goblin-made and therefore in official circulation.Report
They briefly talk about counterfeiting in a few chapters.Report
Yeah, that’s pretty much the fanon on it.
We are specifically told at one point that goblins have magic, it’s just not wand magic. So the assumption is that whatever goblins are doing to make Galleons, it’s a form of magic wizards can’t do.
We do see Galleons duplicated a few times, but no one actually tries to spend the duplicates. And considering that the duplication spell doesn’t seem difficult at all, surely that can’t work as counterfeiting. There must be some trivial test that lets people determine if they’re fake. (Which makes the DA coins much less safe, but as long as no one twigs onto them in the first place…)Report
(Point of order? I’m guessing that 5 chapters a week is not too much/too few?)Report
Are we aiming to read all 122 chapters? At 5 chapters a week that would take us into September. Too long to expect people to hang on?Report
What do you think?
It seems to me that most of the people here are coming back to it after having read it once already. What’s most important to me is that the people who are reading it for the first time are at a lively pace that keeps them engaged.
(On a logistical level, it’s easy for me to throw a weekly post up with one or two sentences describing the chapters so *I* don’t mind having to do that every week until September… I mean, I ain’t goin’ nowhere.)Report
I’d be fine with more chapters / week, but less would be too little for me, personally.
I suspect not charging ahead will be easy some weeks, and other weeks I will end up reading more than the week’s chapters…Report
So… upping to 10? Is that good?
12?
15?Report
I suggest going fast for now, but slowing down later. The chapters get longer and heavier as we go on.Report
10 it is!Report