I Don’t Read Harry Potter

77 Replies to “I Don’t Read Harry Potter”

1. [Poor Ron in Killona was only allowed to read the Encyclopedia Britanica or the Eaton’s catalog as a kid] TC
   That hurt 🙁
   Topics I have read about all my life;
   Geology
   Geography
   Climatology
   Aviation
   Agronomy
   Financial History
   Politics
   Astronomy

2. This just in: Reuters – tinyurl.com/2aomt3 – “The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun published reviews of the final Harry Potter book on Thursday before it went on sale […]”

3. Ron was lucky. I only got to read the Chemical Rubber Company’s Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. And you tell that to kids today. They won’t believe you.
   By the way, on the matter of kids reading, imagination, skills, fact, fiction, &c, in addition to The Hardy Boys and The Dangerous Book for Boys (of course), I’d recommend The Mad Scientists’ Club – tinyurl.com/yqprkn [amazon.ca]. Of course, as I alway say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

4. I haven’t read any HP books. Nothing against HP my son has a well used copy of every HP book and DVD on the market. I used to enjoy reading fiction, especially science fiction but now find I get my fill just reading the broadsheets.

5. ellie in TO – I’m aware that the principle of fairness is not a law. It’s still a principle. Do we only interact with each other according to a law, and if there is no law, we do whatever mischief springs to mind?
   ellie in TO – I think you are being elitist. Why are the HP novels ‘mediocre’? Since I assume you’ve read them – otherwise you couldn’t come up with this judgment- could you first define what is mediocre about them and second, why so many children and adults like this mediocrity?
   With regard to ron in kelowna and the used bookstore – most of the books may be fiction because people tend to hold onto the non-fiction books – ie, philosophical, scientific, historical tomes.
   ellie in TO – I’m very sceptical of surveys until I’ve seen the exact questions. I’ve seen so many surveys with quite astonishing questions! So, I can’t accept your stats. What does ‘reading for fun’ mean? I don’t read for ‘fun’; I read to enjoy the tales. I play games for fun.
   ron in kelowna – the reason Gore’s Travesty has gotten so far, is not because people like fiction, but because people are first, emotional and second, submissive to authority. You had the UN IPCC with its authoritarian report – which is then picked up by Gore and transformed into an apocalpytic scenario. Those two forces, authority and emotion, will do the trick to influence population belief every time. Nothing to do with fiction. It’s basic human nature.
   How do you counter it? With more authority – the authority of outspoken scientists, data, and an appeal to reason. But, it’s not easy and it takes time, because the FIRST and most immediate appeals to belief are always authority and emotion. Not reason. Reason requires doubt, critical thinking, analysis. It’s harder and more time consuming.
   Or, vitruvius, we could say that ‘calamitosus est animus futuri anxius’ which is to say, we shouldn’t try to, out of fear, control our imagination about the future. Huic potatori.

6. Shakespeare was pop culture at one time, too. So was Dickens and every other writer of fiction throughout history. Works become “important” because people read them, get excited, and get other people to read them. Most books written to *be* important are forgotten, and the writers go back to their days jobs, teaching English Lit at a university.
   Harry Potter is good, and it could very well be important one day… but only time will tell on that.

7. Amazing arguments.
   So because Al Gore might be a dreamer then reading should be limited to only “factual” writing for our youth.
   So because one set of statistics say there’s been no discernible improvement in early reading rates then to purgatory with a set of books.
   Point one. Dreaming is not the same as delusion (or dare we hint amoral political posturing for self promotion?). To support the argument Al’s early reading habits should be presented as evidence. After reviewing Al’s more than occasional regurgitation of unimaginative, unsupported “evidence” I doubt the appellation of dreamer instead of amoral fits him very well. I might further point out that the inability to care a dream to it’s conclusion and foresee all the permutations is the reason we have so many hysterics in areas such as climate, politics etc..
   Point two. So what? Does that statistic cover potential reading on the PC from such sources as the Gutenburg Project? My son has retrieved a fair share of books from there. There’s more than a few other sites. Also think e-books that have been available for sale over the last years. I have the bills to prove my children enjoyed those. Also I would note libraries haven’t faded into oblivion yet. I would dare say if the reading statics are vaguely valid then it’s the basic percentage of our children who will expand their minds and inadvertently continue preparing themselves for the future.
   My first full book, at age 8, was Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. Doc Smith. I read it by a coal oil lamp initially (we actually got electricity later that year). I’m in my fifties now. My personnel library is about 3k volumes in size with about 900 of those being scifi. My initial readings made me curious about science, mathmatics political, and later, military theory. In the practical world I went into the military where, trust me, the ability to dream and theorize is very important when doing battle plans and leading combat troops. The ability to “fantasize” courses of action and they’re consequences makes a big difference how many of your own are still alive when it’s done.
   By the arguments given I should have been an indecisive, useless drone. I beg to differ for myself and my now mature children.
   In summation the arguments are that reading doesn’t positively impact children and that reading, other than staid factual articles, is detrimental to children. I call BS. Go ahead though and force your offspring into those molds. We’ll see who’s decedents come out on top.

8. [ .. most of the books may be fiction because people tend to hold onto the non-fiction books ..]ET
   Why ? Because they are worthless after one reading ? —- people realize it is just fiction ? 🙂
   [You had the UN IPCC with its authoritarian report – which is then picked up by Gore and transformed into an apocalpytic scenario.]ET
   Agreed. Fiction.
   [How do you counter it? With more authority – the authority of outspoken scientists, data, and an appeal to reason.]ET
   Agreed. Counter it with non-fiction. My point all along.
   If the media, academia, authors, bookstores, would not push fiction so hard then we would be saved from a lot of unneccessary trouble. And angst. And waste. And misdirected energy.

9. Well, ET — and this comment is not for the kids — speaking as a potatori but not a peccatori, I would point out that H. L. Mencken did say: “The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind”.
   Anyway, though my problem tends to be an over-active imagination, I fully agree that we shouln’t constrain our imagination upon principle, but there are times, such as when wrenching down the nut on a pressure safety valve to determine the set pressure at which it will release, when imagination is generally not something you want to be doing a lot of.
   I have not commented up or down on HP in this thread, but there is a degree to which I agree with Ron, and that is: a little fiction goes a long way. People who wallow in fiction tend to be detached from reality (thank you Mr. Tautology).

10. It is not the reading of fictional work per se that I question — it is the volume of the hype by the media, academia, Hollywood that can be harmful. (AIT)
    How far would Michael Moore have got without Tinseltown ??
    After all, as ET pointed out, a lot of fictional books end up junked in used bookstores — because people read them and discard them. Deed done.

11. [Go ahead though and force your offspring into those molds. We’ll see who’s decedents come out on top.]JD
    An Optometrist and a Pharmaceutical Geneticist.
    Two for two, If I may boast 🙂
    I would think even a latte-crowd-type believes it is sorta nice to see and be healthy.

12. You vill read vat I say to read…und no laffink.
    Potter books are a great read. Like it was said earlier, good character development, continuity and a fair bit of suspense.
    Pat

13. Vitruvius
    That resembles me. I “wallow” in fantasy as the mood strikes. I’ve also wallowed in the mud and the blood on to many occasions. A healthy mind can differentiate and without having the imagination challenged may never dream the important questions.
    ron
    Theoretical mathematician preparing for his doctorate, second one hasn’t selected her major yet though hopefully she will before I go broke (out of state tuition is a pain for a retired army grunt/small business owner who can’t get government subsidization).
    Your point seems to be a concern that reading fiction will lock a child into some fantasy world from which they’ll never emerge. My point is that fantasy is the primer for curiosity and will cause a healthy mind to search for answers. Fantasy is the exercise routine for a person’s imagination. Without imagination I doubt if we’d be much into even the steam age now. Do people get lost in their fantasies? Yep, online gaming is the newest proof that a percentage will be vulnerable to this. After all a fantasy can be far more enticing than reality. This has been true throughout human history. Also true is that people with this predilection will tend to go there despite the non availability of casual fiction sources. This does not, in my opinion, out weight the benefits of encouraging a child’s imagination to ask the “what if” questions.
    A child will dream despite any attempts to prevent it. They’ll spin fantasies while ready Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer or even a dry treatise on the polio vaccine. I contend giving a healthy source of new ideas for these fantasies weighs greatly on the beneficial side. The books in question encourage the “what if” of moral questions. What if I acted nobly. What if I followed the better facets of human nature.
    The ability to imagine “what if” is needed to find the steps leading to the question. It’s important in engineering, military ops, mathematics and even molecular manipulation as researched in Pharmaceutical Geneticism. The more flexible the imagination the better.
    If you want serious flights of “fantasy” to disparage then I encourage you to peruse through say multi-verse theory. A more prominent theory basically denies that fantasy exists since all must occur within an infinite set of universes. By this theory there’s a distant universe in which a Harry Potter is standing outside the Burrow holding a girl named Ginny’s hand at this very moment. Fanciful? The math says it must happen and the general theory has fewer gaping holes than most others of that nature.
    In closing I return to my previous posting examples. Certain societies in the last century, currently existing in the Middle East and in certain enclaves within our own continent are fine examples of controlled access to casual, fantasy instilling, fiction. Fantasy still exists within the minds of the young who lived and are living there now. What outlets have these fantasy manifestations followed? Tell me where you’d live.

14. Ron in Kelowna, to me you are being a bit of a curmudgeon today. I swore off reading fiction in my early 20’s probably for the same reason as you did. I picked up a copy of Issac Asimov’s Foundation in my early 40’s and discovered brilliant fiction. Call me transformed.
    I’m sure glad I didn’t impose my narrow belief of acceptable reading material on my children. They were nuts about Potter.
    I assert that you used your imagination to come up with your dismissive arguments against ET’s views, given your arguments are devoid of supporting data. 90%! Not 91%?
    I suspect the strenuousness of your arguments may be an attempt put a claw mark a little higher up the tree than ET’s. Good luck with that.
    I have never read a Potter book, though I am delighted that my kids enjoyed them as much as they did and do. My 18 and 20 year old dressed in silly clothes just last weekend to go to an HP movie. They are both are in University doing extremely well thank you very much, one in business, the other in science.
    Apparently they weren’t harmed.

15. In our time imagination is given too short a shrift.
    Imagination is the primary potential out of which grow the performing and creative arts. William Blake saw the imagination as a vehicle that carried on the tradition of Hebrew prophets through the agency of poets and creators of literature. After all, Blake figured that the visionary experience called upon imagination and inspiration that brought what was numinous on the inside into the experience of the physical world. So this put, in Blake’s view, the artist as a kind of priest mediating inner experience into the actualities of the sensory-oriented world.
    In this he was basically following the Romantic Tradition which saw (in Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron) nature as a symbolic gateway into the world of ideas and imagination. Symbolists like Verlaine and Rimbeaux drew symbols from any quarter, not just nature, and attempted to do the same thing.
    There is a whole imaginative tradition that winds its secret way through Western life. Joseph Campbell says that the best introduction to this is “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition” by Frances A. Yates. (I recommend Dame Yates’s third volume of Collected Essays, “Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance” and her work “The Art of Memory,” that Renaissance system of imagination and memory that allowed orators to memorize speeches so incredibly long that today one would rarely even believe possible the memory system presented to the mind.
    There are those who see the imagination as having an epistemology of its own. It has been said that a technology of the imagination is the middle ground between science and religion, reconciling them. Physicians at the time of Paracelsus called on this view in the practice of their science.
    And then there are philosophers like Douglas Fawcett who posit the imagination in the place that Schopenhauer would place Will and Hegel would place Reason. As you can see this is a world view that comprehends existence as a product of an Envisioner in contemplation of a vision.
    Coleridge said, “The Imagination, I consider as either primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary Imagination I consider as the echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, indifferent only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) as fixed and dead.”

16. HILLARY CLINTON AND HER CHAMBER OF SECRETS, And FAWKES THE PHOENIX is getting tired and angry at her and her wackos haning onto his tailfeathers SQUAWK SQUAWK LET GO OF ME YOU LIBERALS OR I,LL DO WHAT ALL BIRDS DO SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK

17. With all the hoopla on SDA about HP. Here’s a view of the Harry Potter phenomena.
    http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=91a62f30-6f8c-4bb0-a18f-baf1da89c6de
    Pat

18. ET: “Popper’s devastating criticism of Marx (and I’m a fan of Popper and agree with him).”
    At one time I, too, thought Popper had a devastating critique of Marx (and of religion and of a lot of other things). I have since changed my mind about many things, though I still think he (i.e. Popper) makes some important points. Interestingly enough, I once met a Latin American marxist who said much the same thing.
    Anyway, good for you for defending the HP books. I am perplexed by the criticisms advanced by many here. I suspect some of them are just chronically angry. (I say that with some sympathy.)

19. “I can’t accept your stats.”
    Then, ET, will you kindly supply some stats of your own to back up your arguments, which so far have been fact-free.
    Yukon Gold: comparing Rowling to Dickens and Shakespeare is not going to win you my respect. It IS a good way to convince me you’re a nitwit.

20. ellie in TO – How about answering my questions, for your comments on the Rowlings books are completely fact free.
    What were the questions in the survey? Surely you know that survey questions can be biased and lead to invalid results.
    Again, what does ‘reading for fun’ mean?
    Have you actually read the Potter books, and would you therefore, clarify why you conclude that they are ‘mediocre’. Personally, I am of the opinion that you haven’t read them; you sound too ‘full of yourself’ to stoop to the level of the peasantry.
    The fact that no law was broken by Collier is, as I said, irrelevant. What was broken was the principle of fairness. For example, do you give up your seat to an elderly person or pregnant woman on the bus? Is that a law? NO?? Or is it simply a principle of fairness to another? Do you behave to others only if there is a law that tells you to do so? And if there is no law, then, you do whatever you please?
    By the way – notice how the ignorant peasants are out enjoying themselves, waiting for the book to be released. In Toronto, they’ve closed down part of a major intersection and transformed it into a ‘Diagon Alley’ from the book; there’s music and costumes and contests – everyone having a great time.
    Ahhh, the impoverished minds of the peasantry; it takes so little to please them, doesn’t it ellie. Bread and circuses. Or, as the Liberals have informed us – beer and popcorn. Or, as you are informing us – Harry Potter books.
    We are all, ignorant peasants, satisfied with, in your terms, ‘mediocrity’. That’s why thousands of children – and adults – all over the world – are waiting at the bookstore, at midnight if you can believe it, in costumes, having a great time – waiting for that book. We are all, mediocre, aren’t we?
    I know you haven’t read the books, but you remind me of Dolores Umbridge – a character in the Order of the Phoenix.

21. A nerve seems to have been struck.
    Why so seriously indignant over fiction ?
    Is this ‘soft spot’ the reason for the success of the clearly fictitious major pieces; AIT and F-911 ?? Scary.
    Every ‘imagination’ deserves the ‘benefit of the doubt’. A ‘sorting out’ will determine if it is feasible, harmless, usefull, dangerous, expensive, entertaining, a life skill or just silly.
    Problem is, although some may be catagorized in minutes, some may take decades, even centuries. And may cause wars.

22. “That’s why thousands of children – and adults – all over the world – are waiting at the bookstore, at midnight if you can believe it, in costumes, having a great time – waiting for that book.”
    What does it say on the Golden Arches, ET? “Billions and billions served.” So Big Macs ARE good for you, I guess, ’cause that many people CAN’T be wrong.
    As someone else here observed, time will tell. As hard as it may be for you to believe, Mr Potter may yet go the way of Goosebumps, Pet Rocks, Care Bears, Tickle Me Elmo, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the Spice Girls, The X-Files, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Pokemon, The Celestine Prophecy, and everything else that the wise all-knowing public has declared to be The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. We’ll see…

23. no, ellie, you have not read the Potter books and yet you still define them as ‘mediocre’ – now, that’s a reasonable and intelligent action, isn’t it? Sounds more like elitist snobbery and prejudice to me.
    I know you think that the peasantry don’t know what is good for them and you must make rules for them about ‘how to live’. Ahh, you are a version of Dolores Umbridge.
    As for MacDonald’s not being ‘good for you’, well, they aren’t bad for you; and in addition, you know what you are getting and millions of people like the TASTE, the ease, and the satisfaction. It’s wierd about people, ellie, but not everyone wants only what is good for them; they also want to like something.
    I know we peasants are ignorant, ellie, and we need Wise Elitists like you to guide us. Or do we?
    In this day of democracy, we have discovered that we have minds rather equal to yours, and we’ll make our own decisions about what we like, thank you very much. Especially valid when the Wise Men haven’t a clue about what they are talking about. You haven’t read the Potter books – and yet, you still sniff at them with your nose in the air. That’s the sign of a rational person or a bigoted person?
    As for their passing fancy – who cares? Each of those examples you mention is a version of a basic Form – and the Form, which is abstract, is never fully articulated. So, there’ll be lots more of these versions of that Basic Form. We peasants are so lucky that we have the imagination to create more versions.

24. I think this is what Kate meant by her post on Potter — as only Rex Murphy can put it;
    [The Potter series has been inextricably grafted onto the great promotional arts of global marketing and publicity, pioneered with Hollywood and supplemented by the celebrity-entertainment machinery of our media-saturated age.
    The Potter series has taken all these arts and, in a touch of genius, yoked them to the absolutely benign uplift of “getting or helping children to read.” Rarely have commerce and edification found so silky and profitable a bed. Who is, who can be, against “getting children to read?” It would be worse than badmouthing recycling. To recast an ancient injunction – It were better a man lash himself to a Hummer, and be bulldozed into a wetland, than question getting the little ones to read.] RM
    http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20070721/COREX21/Headlines/headdex/headdexComment/11/11/18/

25. “A nerve seems to have been struck.” Ron in Kelowna
    Yours apparently.
    Ellie in T.O…….. you forgot the Beatles, you know those guys who started with “She Loves you ya ya ya”. Boy, those guy’s certainly were doomed to fade from the scene were’nt they Ellie. I’d hate to be you.

26. Ya gotta love capitalism. Pure magic.

27. Ye gods, ET, you’re defensive. Why do you have so much invested in this? Can it be that you suspect deep down that I’m right? I know the Potter books are mediocre because I read two of them (the second one was required reading for a course)and found them to be horribly written, derivative and cliched. (Oh, and I majored in English.)
    Here’s a news flash for you: I DO NOT HAVE TO LIKE EVERYTHING THAT YOU LIKE. Also, strange as it may seem, I am entitled to my own (educated)opinion. Accept it. You’re not going to convert me to your childish fetish, and you’re certainly not impressing me. In fact, you’re just confirming my opinion of Potter fans as adults with arrested development.