Reading Harry Potter in America
Ron Charles, Literary Critic for the Washington Post, has a problem with Harry Potter:
But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling’s books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over “Harry Potter” with nary a child in sight. Waterstone’s, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” may be read by more adults than children. Rowling’s U.K. publisher has even been releasing “adult editions.” That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don’t worry. They’re the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets — Cap’n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
Many of those adults who are reading Harry Potter may not have time to read Serious Literature, because they’re too busy trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their overly bloated mortgage, keep their kids in a school that isn’t hamstrung by NCLB, or pay for health care. Perhaps if our American Culture wasn’t so money obsessed and corporatized, adults would have some extra leisure time to read other novels as well. But they don’t and so most of them won’t. But some will. Surprising as it may sound– shocking, even to lit snobs like Charles, some of us Harry Potter fans also read other Serious Literature (though I will be setting aside Against the Day for Deathly Hollows. That’s just how it’s going to play out).
Bemoan the state of literate America all you like but Harry Potter is a signifier of a trend in aliteracy being fought against, not for. Unless you’re one of the many Lit Crit clowns who think that more people reading Harry Potter books somehow translates into less people reading. I’ve done the math and my figures come out to more people reading equals more people reading, not less. But maybe I’m using that old math where 2+2=4, rather than -3.
Charles brings up the much touted NEA report that concluded adults read less and the rate of adult reading for pleasure is declining. too bad the report isn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It’s major flaw is that it only classifies reading printed novels as reading for pleasure, ignoring online reading such as blogs and online excerpts of books, nonfiction and magazines. It also fails to account for the fact that the number of books bought and sold each year is increasing. Either we’re buying an awful lot of books and not reading them or perhaps the statistical methodology of the report is flawed. Either way, people still read. Maybe not as much or as often as they used to, but no one’s bothered to look into why that may be, they just assume that it’s Ye Olde Scourge of TV and and the new mind muncher, video games. Surely it has nothing at all to do with the fact that most English curricula haven’t changed their book lists in fifty years.
Forcing children to read Ivan Hoe, Ethan Frome and Catcher in the Rye isn’t exactly going to make them enthusiastic for reading as adults. If all the literature you’re exposed to is boring crap people thought was Serious fifty years ago, it’s no wonder no one wants to read anything more Serious than Harry Potter. Never mind that a series of books averaging 700 pages a piece that deals with the moral, ethical and emotional ramifications of death, adolescence, political corruption and terrorism are considered lacking in Seriousness. Sure, but where’s the endless pedantic navel gazing and neurotic sexual hangups of such Serious Literature as The Corrections or Everything is Illuminated? Why doesn’t Harry Potter have talking tigers and cannibalism? Why can’t it be like the Pulitzer prize winners of yore? You know, about a gay comic book creator and his folklore-obsessed cousin.
I think Mr. Charles’ problem is the same one that plagues many people who grew up under the tutelage of such lit crit snobbery as Doctor Bloom and his ridiculous cannon, namely that in the last thirty years, the walls between highbrow and lowbrow art an dliterature have become porous to nonexistent. We live in an age of comic book scholarship, where TV genre shows like Battlestar Galactica are more moving and deal with more current ideas than anything the serious Authors of our age have to offer. We also are at the cusp of a great change, in which content is becoming decoupled from a fixed media. Stories are more important then ever, no matter if they come in the form of novels, movies, TV shows or video games. People still read but they also interact more fluidly with their entertainment. As we continue to adapt to changing media, our stories will as well. Novels may level off and become just one of any number of forms through which we tell our stories but so long as we do tell stories and people are moved by them, who cares what form they come in, so long as they arrive wrapped in anticipation and joy.
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I have read the “great” books, many of the foreign works in their original languages as well as English. What in hell does that have to do with wanting to read a good yarn that shuts out the horrors of living in the Shrubbery’s America for several hours?
If you are depressed I wouldn’t suggest you read the Russian masters, or Germans for that manner. Everyone needs a break and the feeling that good guys occasionally do win.
Ms Rowlings wrote a book for young adults. That adults like her writing means she is the richest woman in Britain. I have never read that she thinks her works belong in the Western Canon. Can’t people read for enjoyment anymore?
Read for pleasure? Gosh what a sweet notion. You are supposed to read for validating literary critics and their hangers on don’t you know?
Joy has become such an underrated aspect of anything we do, unless it is some martini fuelled schadenfreude at the ‘faux pas’ of others.