Harry Potter and The Deathly Hype
I have been amused watching the reports of Rowling’s Ted Kennedy levels of outrage over the leaks of her latest pot boiler. She is so mad that anyone would dare to presume to wreck her set in stone plan, no one should be allowed to read her sacred book before the date that she decreed. Whenever I see a billionaire so outraged about something that doesn’t involve death or destruction I have to wonder what is really going on here.
JKR has said that she wants all the books released on the same day so that kids all around the world will enjoy the experience of reading it together. She doesn’t want one kid to have the book before all the rest of them. Except that isn’t what is going to happen today, there are a lot of kids being left out of today’s hype fest. I checked with my local library there are 892 requests for the latest Potter tome. That means a lot of kids will have to wait weeks, maybe months to read what Rowling wants every kid to read today. Remember those kids JK; they are called poor.
No JKR is such a stickler about release dates because what she lacks in talent, grammar or understanding of the human heart, she makes up for in marketing genius. If the book was allowed to trickle out to the stores at differing days then she wouldn’t be able to create a mania that propelled thousands of children and their foolish parents out at midnight last night. Harry Potter isn’t a book it’s a mania. There were plenty of better written, more fantastical children’s books in the world before Harry was unleased. But they came around before the Internet, the 24/7 news cycle and all the technology of our day that turns mere fads into over night religions.
So Harry Potter gets kids to read. But what do they read, not the classics, nor history nor poetry. No they read a very simple to digest, uncomplicated fad book. They jump on the bandwagon and do what every other kid does. That isn’t going to turn them into serious readers. It is far more likely having been fed on a diet of Rowling’s simple sentence structure and slang they are going to have a great deal of trouble reading any serious work of literature. JKR loves Jane Austen, but kids who have memorized Rowling’s works are going to draw a blank at Austen’s complex sentence structure and vocabulary.
Which reminds me of Dr. Seuss and the rest of the dumbed down children’s literature that has resulted in a nation of morons. But I will savage Mr. Geisel on another day.
The Young Prince rejected Harry Potter very early on. He loved Narnia though and read the complete works when he was 6. He is working on the Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare now. Ah bliss it is to have a Harry free child.
I shall be waiting for your “Harry Potter and the Seuss’ Kids” post. Will you be writing it in rhyme?
With the multiplication of distractions throughout society today serious reading suffers decline. In particular, if the child has no relatives nearby who reads. This is the reason I wrote in Harry Potter and the Luddite about JRK’s getting boys to read. She offered a stepping-stone; a stepping-stone if it leads toward better literary tastes. That is the question: What will these Harry Potter fans read next? I am less concerned about their reading fantasty novels as entry-books because I recall my own beginning with the pocket-books of the Get Smart stories, then advancing to my first serious novel which was Boris Pasternak’s (Junahi Konkka – translator) Tohtori Zivago. [hint to my nephew, who registered as a subscriber under the nickname of Kingsley (HP7 character) at this blog, read P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster series for your post Potter reading.]