Unit3
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
——Seneca, Roman philosopher
Why Harry’s Hot?
1. J. K. Rowling swears she never saw it coming. In her wildest dreams, she didn't think her Harry Potter books would appeal to more than a handful of readers. "I never expected a lot of people to like them," she insisted in a recent interview. "Well, it turned out I was very wrong, obviously. It strikes a chord with an enormous number of people." That's putting it mildly. With 35 million copies in print, in 35 languages, the first three Harry Potter books have earned a conrvatively estimated $480 million in three years. And that was just the warm-up. With a first printing of 5.3 million copies and advance orders topping 1.8 million, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth installment of the ries, promis to break every booklling record. Jack Morrisy, 12, plainly speaks for a generation of readers when he says, "The Harry Potter books are like life, but better."
2. Amazingly, Rowling keeps her veral plotlines clear of each other until the end, when he deftly brings everything together in a cataclysmic conclusion. For pure narrative power, this is the best Potter book yet.
3. When the book finally went on sale at 12:01 am. Saturday, thousands of children in Britain and North America rushed to claim their copies. Bookstores hosted pajama parties, hired magicians and rved cookies and punch, but nobody needed to lift the spirits of the crowds. In one ca, customers made such a big, happy noi that neighbors called the cops. At a Borders in Charlotte, N.C., Erin Rankin, 12, quickly thumbed to the back as soon as she got her copy. “I heard that a_ major character dies, and I really want to find out who," she said. But minutes later she gave up. “I just can't do it. I can't read the end first."
4. The only sour note in all the songs of joy over this phenomenon has come from some parents and conrvative religious leaders who say Rowling advocates witchcraft. reading of the books has been challenged in 25 school districts in at least 17 states, and t
he books have been banned in schools in Kansas and Colorado. But that's nothing new, says Michael Patrick Hearn, a children's book scholar and editor of The Annotated Wizard, of Oz. "Any kind of magic is considered evil by some people," he says. "The Wizard of Oz was attacked by fundamentalists in the mid-1980s."
5. But perhaps the most curious thing about the Potter phenomenon, especially given that it is all about books, is that almost no one has taken the time to say how good— or bad—the books are. The other day my 11-year-old daughter asked me if I thought Harry Potter was a classic. I gave her, I'm afraid, one of tho adult-sounding answers when I said, "Time will tell." This was not an outright lie. There's no telling which books will survive from one generation to the next. But the fact is, I was hedging. What my daughter really wanted to know was how well J. K. Rowling stacks up against the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson or Madeleine L'Engle.
6. I could have told her that I thought they were beautifully crafted works of entertainment, the literary equivalent of Steven Spielberg. I could also have told her I tho
ught the Potter books were derivative. They share so many elements with so many children's classics that sometimes it ems as though Rowling had asmbled her novels from a kit. However, the novels amount to, much more than just the sum of their parts. The crucial aspect of their appeal is that they can be read by children and adults with equal pleasure. Only the best authors—and they can be as different as Dr. Seuss and Philip Pullman" and, yes, J.|K. Rowling—can pull that off.
7. P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, put it best when she wrote, "You do not chop off a ction of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for—if you are honest— you have, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. There is plenty for children and adults to enjoy in Rowling's books, starting with their language. Her pro may be unadorned, but her way with naming people and things reveals a quirky and original talent.
8. The best writers remember what it is like to be a child with astonishing intensity. Time and again, Rowling articulates just how defenless even the bravest children often feel.
Near the end of the cond book Dumbledore, the wi and protective headmaster, is banished from Hogwarts. This terrifies Harry and his schoolmates—"With Dumbledore gone, fear had spread as never before"—and it terrified me. And in all of Rowling's books there runs an undercurrent of sadness and loss. In the first book the orphaned Harry stares into the Mirror of Erid, which shows the viewer his or her utmost desires. Harry es his dead parents. "Not until I'd reread what I'd written did I realize that that had been taken entirely- entirely- from how I felt about my mother's death," Rowling said. "In fact, death and bereavement and what death means, I would say, is one of the central themes in all ven books." Do young readers pick up on all this deep intellectualism? Consciously, perhaps not. But I don't think the books would have their broad appeal if they were only exciting tales of magical adventure, and I know adults would not find them so enticing.
