This thread is a focused discussion group. Please see the first post below for the current topic and upcoming book discussions. While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit.
By consensus, this thread is reopened specifically to discuss Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will be closed again once that discussion has run its course.
***SPOILER ALERT***
- **Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows lie here. Read at your own risk***
my impression is that narrators often don't bother to flag someone's skintone/nationality/religion if they belong to the same group as the narrator
I would say that in general it's fairly obvious that most of the people in most of the books I read are white because of a telltale physical description that makes it at the very least highly improbable they're anything else.
As for similar skintone, well, most black people aren't my skintone, so what would I be expected to do as a narrator? And I'm not singling myself out for special treatment--just that with the random mixing there's chocolate this and au lait that and high yellow and red bones and ... we got them all, man. And we will use them describing each other.
And I'm not singling myself out for special treatment--just that with the random mixing there's chocolate this and au lait that and high yellow and red bones and ... we got them all, man. And we will use them describing each other.
And Maya Angelou wrote a poem about just that - about all the ways to describe different shades of skin color among people of recent African descent. I'll link it if I find it on line, quote it if I find it off.
"Is that it? Are we done?"
I'm thinking "yeah". Until the next big book. I DO like having this available if there's some book a large number of Buffistas are going to read (but it can just be closed and re-opened).
Bye bye thread. ::pats thread on its little thread head::
