Indexed and Harry Potter

In case you haven't heard of the blog Indexed yet, here's a great recent card that she posted:

I love Indexed because it combines two of my favorite things, graphs and index cards.

I didn't think I would post about the whole Dumbledore thing, but I read a blog post today (by ShelfTalker) that 100% summed up my feelings on the issue, much better than I could have hoped to.  Here's the link to the wonderful post, and here's an excerpt (I've bolded the points I like most):

I personally don't like hearing about characters' lives off the printed page, because to my mind that's NOT those characters. Characters exist only as we know them as readers, and the information we're given about them is what appears in the stories that are written about them and nowhere else. If an author believes something about her characters but doesn't make those beliefs clear in her writing about them, there's no guarantee that the reader will pick up on or share those same beliefs. Those character may not, then, "BE" what the writer envisioned them to be.

I think the semantics of Rowling's original announcement are significant. “I always saw Dumbledore as gay,” she said. And that's exactly it. SHE always saw Dumbledore as gay. But many of her readers did not, and it seems unfair now to suggest that they/we were somehow wrong.

As readers we each come to a book with our own ideas, our own experiences, our own interests, and those things inevitably influence what we see on the printed page. In the end, Dumbledore is gay if you read the Harry Potter books and believed he was gay, he's straight if you read the books and believed he was straight, and he's non-sexual if (like me) you just never bothered to think about his sex life at all.

Let's end this post with a great link I found on Design*Sponge today, a link to a site with horribly excellent pictures of Europe's worst interior designs of 1974 - Eurobad '74.