Tonight is the end of an era; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the final in the series) is being released at midnight tonight. It's the afternoon of Friday, July 20th and and right now nothing is hotter than Potter...
I saw a report that although Israeli law requires businesses to be closed on a Saturday in observance of the Sabbath, booksellers over there are saying to hell with the law. There's a Barnes and Noble pretty close to me; I've never been to a midnight Harry Potter release party and I should try and get over there because it'll be my last chance...
People give J.K. Rowling credit for getting children to read again. I think she deserves lots of praise for creating engaging and imaginative stories which are incredibly smart. It's formulaic that there be a plot twist at the end of each one, and knowing this each time as I go through a part of the series, thinking all the while I am a pretty smart guy reading a book I took from the children's literature section, I've never, ever been able to correctly figure out what the ending would be, and certainly have fallen for all the red herrings brilliantly woven in.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's totally accurate to claim J.K. Rowling has gotten children to read generally; rather, she's gotten them to read Harry Potter. How much of it has spilt over to inducing consumption of other literature? Now that the series is over, will children continue to read?
In 4th grade, I brought out the original 400-page version of of Bram Stoker's Dracula when at least some of my classmates were probably struggling with Red Fish Blue Fish. Observing this, my teacher wanted me to start reading only high school books, to encourage what she saw as an advanced reading ability (I'm trying to be modest). Clearly she didn't get it: I didn't want to read high school level books, I just wanted to read Dracula. Ms. Rowling certainly has created an explosion of reading, but is the situation similar? Is it that these young muggles have been introduced to literature and adopted a general joy of reading, or is it that they just want to read Harry Potter?
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