Harry And The Potters’ summer reading list

It shouldn’t need to be said that the members of wizard-rock outfit Harry And The Potters are pretty fond of a certain seven-book series penned by J.K. Rowling: Virtually every one of their songs deals with characters and events in the Harry Potter novels, and the act dresses up in Gryffindor colors and Hogwarts-inspired student uniforms when it performs. But when brothers Paul and Joe DeGeorge aren’t singing (or reading) about the teenaged wizard, it’s likely their noses are pressed into a book. Before the Massachusetts-based band makes a stop in Lincoln Square for a free show July 7 in Giddings Plaza, The A.V. Club caught up with the brothers to receive summer-reading recommendations for readers of all ages.

His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
Paul DeGeorge: Honestly, it doesn’t even read like a young adult book to me in a lot of ways. It reads like a total, awesome epic fantasy. I think Pullman is just an incredible writer. That’s just his masterwork. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any other books from Pullman that were as engaging. Generally, I think he writes for a younger audience. Everybody I know I’ve given that book to has loved it. It’s just a phenomenal series with amazing writing and an amazing story.

The A.V. Club: Do you think that this was classified as juvenile fiction merely because it has a young protagonist?

PD: Yeah. I think that happens a lot more frequently nowadays, too. You see that with Hunger Games, as well. [There’s] a juvenile protagonist, so people just assume it’s written for a certain subset of the population. I know so many people who are my age or older who just love those books.

In the same way, you can look at The Catcher In The Rye as juvenile fiction, but nobody’s going to contest that that’s not one of the best novels of the 21st century. I think young adult fiction has this stigma nowadays that it’s only written for young adults, or with them in mind. I don’t think that’s necessarily true of a lot of it, and especially I don’t think it’s true of His Dark Materials.

The BFG by Roald Dahl
Joe DeGeorge: It kind of has some Harry Potter parallels, like that English children’s story where it stars an orphan. It’s pretty fundamental to any British children’s story to have an orphan. [Laughs.] It’s just a really cool, fantastical adventure. My favorite part was when Sophie, the girl, is hanging out with the Giant. He picks her up out of the orphanage and they go to Giant Land. He shows her all the dreams that he catches and puts them in jars. Then some of the dreams get out. It was just a cool, imaginative experience that I found interesting as a child. It sparked my imagination, too.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
PD: The premise of it is that there’s a capital city and 12 districts that all answer to the capital city. Every year the capital hosts what are called the hunger games, where they demand two tributes from every district. Every child between the ages of 11 and 18 has to enter their name into a lottery, and if you get picked, you end up in an arena, like, coliseum-style fight to the death with all the other tributes from all the other districts. It’s all broadcast live on national TV, and everyone is required to watch it. This is now young adult fiction! I think it’s amazing because it has such relevant commentary on the ways that people are entertaining themselves these days, with these crazy reality-TV shows.

AVC: Do you think that kids can pick up on the social commentary in that, or is it veiled behind the plot?

PD: I think in the case of these books, it’s easy enough to pick up on that aspect of the social commentary. People are forced into watching these events on TV. It’s basically reality TV at its most gruesome.

Paper Towns by John Green
PD: John is a pretty impressive writer, sort of in the style of J.D. Salinger, with these protagonists that are struggling with these existential questions and stuff like that. His books are really fun and full of engaging pop-culture references and stuff. Paper Towns in particular is loaded with quotes at the beginning of chapters, whatever the word for that is, he was using lyrics from Mountain Goats songs. He’s got references to Neutral Milk Hotel. He’s infusing a lot of his personal tastes into the book. It makes it really fun and engaging. For people who are into pop culture and want that character to relate to, like Holden Caulfield gave to kids from the last 60 years, he’s doing it in a more modern context.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
JD: It’s about a kid who’s flying over Canadian wilderness, and the pilot has a heart attack and dies. He crash-lands the plane in this lake. It’s about his spending a summer in the wilderness, living off the land and trying to survive with very minimal supplies. That was a really cool book. Along those same lines, I had read this book, [Jean Craighead George’s] My Side Of The Mountain, but I didn’t think it was as good as Hatchet. The kid in that book didn’t make any mistakes. He was just living in the woods like a perfect Boy Scout, burning out trees and hollowing them out. Hatchet seemed way more real, full of hardship and triumph.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
JD: That was the first fantasy book I ever read. Maybe The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe is something kids might read before that. The Hobbit is just a total other world. I remember trying to read it when I was in elementary school, but didn’t appreciate it until I was in junior high school. There’s just so many dwarves; to remember all those names, it’s hard when you’re 8 years old.

AVC: With so much Tolkien-related hype around the movies, is it something that kids rush into at too early of an age?

JD: I’d recommend that to junior-high aged kids. It was on my summer reading list when I was in seventh grade.

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle
PD: That was one of those books I remember reading over and over again as a kid, in part because there’s some physics concepts in there that I didn’t quite get. Like how they’re able to travel through wormholes, or whatever it was they were doing. I’m still not sure I understand it! Maybe that’s the fault of Madeleine L’Engle. A few years ago when we were touring libraries really heavily, we would put out summer reading lists of books we really loved and just wanted to share with everybody. It would have adult books and young adult books. I know we had A Wrinkle In Time on one. I just thought that when we had it on our book list it was really cool. We were touring with Harry And The Potters, of course, and a lot of the stuff we do is about the power of love, because that’s the power Harry has to defeat Voldemort. That’s basically the same weapon they have in A Wrinkle In Time, the power of love. I was like, “Whoa, that’s really cool.”