Jul

15

Both of America's agenda-setting broadsheets — The Washington Post and The New York Times — have seen fit to allege the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon represents a failure to stem the decline in book reading:

Washington Post –

Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party? Millions of adults and children are reading! We keep hearing that "Harry Potter" is the gateway drug that's luring a reluctant populace back into bookstores and libraries. Even teenage boys — Wii-addicted, MySpace -enslaved boys! — are reading again, and if that's not magic, what is?

Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't encourage much optimism.

New York Times –

The truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

I've read each of the six extant books no fewer than four times (once for myself, once aloud to each of my two kids, and once with my daughter as a learn-to-read exercise). There's simply no disputing the quality of the story-telling.

Similarly, there's no disputing the sheer magnitude of the global Potter publishing enterprise, which has earned its creator (who started out scratching longhand paragraphs in a Scottish coffeehouse) a billion dollars in barely a decade.

Given the undeniable success of the Harry Potter franchise, why then do the old lions of American letters wish to pooh-pooh its laurels?

I'd like to say it is cultural prejudice. The good-guy kids are, by and large, clean living independent thinkers who respect worthy grown-ups, love their families, distrust their government, and act ethically to preserve a society they value. Good and evil are clear.

Why, the economy of the wizard world is even based on gold! But I suspect the sneering .doc drafters aren't that high minded.

The success of Potter, like that of the squeaky-clean American Girl franchise, is a rebuke of the tawdry, PC moral relativism that's become the stock-in-trade of most US scribes, who now see their entire moral universe shunted to the back shelves and remainder bins of book stores around the world.

I expect to be sad when I finish the seventh Harry Potter book next week, but I'm sure jealous authors around the world can't wait for summer to end.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

The Times used to be something you read because, like C-SPAN now, there were actual facts mixed in with the officially-sanctioned drivel. Gay Talese would actually go over to 10th Avenue or up to the Bronx and write about what he saw, and Homer Bigart would do the same. You could also read the shipping news.

Now, the Times is little more than a parody of itself — all the news that fits our ideology we (sometimes) print. I have not worked in publishing in 35 years, but I do keep in touch with my brother, who just retired from Pearson, and other now-aging Baby Boomers who know there was a Cerf named Bennett.

For what little it is worth, what we think is that young people do not read for the same reason that they always "did not read": as George points out, almost everything written for them is so infernally preachy that it's a wonder anyone reads it at all. Our Dad thought comic books were the secret explanation for the boom in standardized test scores in the early 1960s — the last time there was a measurable increase in literacy among school age children. "All of you kids were doing McGuffy drills each night under the covers trying to find out what happened to the Fantastic Four." 


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