Harry Potter and Who Gives a Shit Already?

When I first heard that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books were being attacked by far-right religious conservatives for promoting the occult, black magic, and general evilry, my initial reaction was one of relief and approbation. No matter that the reasons behind our opinions were vastly different; I was assuaged simply by the fact that finally, somewhere, amid the blind, orgiastic bloodlust for Harry Potter (more! more!), my sentiments were being echoed:
Harry Potter sucks.

The last of the Harry Potter books was released today, July 21, 2007. Just like its predecessors, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was snatched up by jonesing fans that ranged from the very young to the very old. The fanaticism over Rowling's series is nothing new - it has been surging ad nauseum with each release of the seven books. Yet seeing the media coverage still elicited in me a very real sense of disgust. A Yahoo! News article describes a parent of two grabbing a copy while shouting "Mine! Mine!", while apparently in Britain, "a phone counseling service for children expects a surge in calls when readers learn who is killed."*

As a way of categorically delving into just what is wrong with this scene (many, many, things, and all overlapping with each other), let me break down my arguments.

First of all, and at the root, the books are mediocre at best. To any Harry Potter fan who questions my judgment, let me assure you by saying that I have read every single word of the first third of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, before putting it down and never opening another Harry Potter book again. Of what I read, I found the writing to be stylistically bland, while the story and characters themselves were unsubtle and formulaic. The whole idea of wizards and curses and evil caretakers just smacked of mass appeal and unoriginality. I cannot even believe that Rowling has been compared to Roald Dahl, which is just pure blasphemy. The magic in Dahl is wit, brevity, and invention; in Rowling, it comes from hundreds of pages of wands and flying broomsticks. In short: read a bad book once, shame on the author. Read a bad book and its sequel(s), shame on the reader. I learned my lesson quickly.

This point, however, seems lost on those who look to Harry Potter as the savior of tweens and adolescents who are more web- and game-savvy than well-read. It is they who hailed R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books in a similar fashion, saying, At least it gets the kids reading! But if you are going to get technical, isn’t scouring the latest issue of TV Guide considered “reading” as well? Those who truly value the importance of books will understand the difference between reading for the sake of developing literacy and reading for the sake of developing one’s mind and one’s capacity for higher thinking and knowledge. (And then there is reading for fun, which innocuous but no better or worse than watching a movie just for the special effects.) The former is acceptable for new readers who are still acclimating themselves to the world of the written word – that is why the Babysitter’s Club and the Boxcar Children books are abandoned (hopefully) after 3^rd or 4^th grade, and a more rigorous reading curriculum is adopted in schools. I simply do not believe that the popularity of Harry Potter leads to a rise in quality reading by young adults any more than watching reality shows leads to a love of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Are we imbedded in such a state that any book passes as quality reading?

This all leads to my last point, which is the dumbing down of our society at large. Let's face it - it is naive to even discuss Harry Potter solely as a book. Its enjoyment by its readers has been heavily supplemented with accompanying movies, promos, gear, and even a video game. Whereas buying a book once led to the solitary pleasure of enjoying a book, it has now become another means of subservience to mass media and commercialism. As Ron Charles describes further in his Washington Post article, "Harry Potter and the Death of Reading", reading has now become latching on to the latest (inter)national craze, being caught up-to-date with the rest of the nation, or the world. In other words, if millions of people aren't reading it, it probably is not worth reading. What a shame for the unread worthwhile reads out there. An even bigger shame for the unpublished authors whose submissions are judged by publishers as incapable of turning a buck.

I'll end this last point on a funny little news story I read - you can google it easily. A writer, frustrated by constant rejections by publishers, decided to submit some Jane Austen chapters (changing only character and chapter names) just to see what would happen. Of 18 publishers, only one recognized his submissions as being Austen replicates, and the rest either rejected or ignored the submissions.

Such is the state of literature, and readers, today.

*Collett-White, Mike. "Spoilers and Hysteria as Harry Potter's End Nears." 21 July 2007.