Harry Potter

[Terrance]

Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> Howdy
> --- desert search for techno allah <kortbein at iastate.edu> wrote:
> but the thing is, there are lots of adults reading them,too
> 
> I've read them because my son Thomas has read them many times.  He has
> read hundreds of books. Many of them many, many times. Many of the
> relatively long ones are in theis category. Roald Dahl is a favorite of
> his.  I decided to read Harry Potter because I wanted to keep a hand
> in, so to speak, to know what they are about, if there is anything that
> supports discussion.  There isn't much really, and they are almost
> totally benign -- they are pleasant, and fun, and not altogether as
> simplistic as you make them sound, vis a vis good guys and bad guys.
> Not all bad.
> 
> Roald Dahl is good too, better, but hey, Harry is *cool*, and thats not
> bad.
> 
> I'm going to give him Tolkein for his birthday.  He will be nine. FWIW
> 
> Mark
> 
> ps:  If you are concerned about creepy mass marketing, tune in to the
> bizarre stuff going on with Chicken Run at Burger King.


Roland Dahl, the world's most scumdiddlyumptious
storyteller. In Kozol's Illiterate America, citing Ford
Foundation figures, he estimates that sixty million
Americans are at least functionally illiterate, he quotes
the U.N. statistics to the effect that the United States
ranks forty-ninth in literacy levels among, at the time, 158
U.N. countries. The situation has not improved in the last
twenty years. The National Assessment of Education Progress
shows a marked decline in inferential comprehension among
secondary-level readers-- and a marked lessening in the
degree to which kids value and enjoy reading by the time
they reach high school. At the same time, the level of
literacy required to function in American society is
steadily increasing. This is yet another crisis in America.
What's to be done? Well, we can  volunteer for the Literary
Volunteers of America. Also, I think the New Yorker cartoon
snobbish reader, ensconced in a leather wing chair in his
library full of "classics" is not the image of literacy we
need today. He is a pedantic, punctilious, absolutely
dispassionate snob who keeps his messy personal associations
and prejudices shelved neatly between Aalto and Zola while
he brings to bear a received body of literary criticism. The
figure for literacy should be a good reader, not the snob
that wouldn't read Harry Potter if he were in a Twilight
Zone episode locked in his library, had broken his only pair
of reading glasses and Potter, left on his desk by his
maid,  was the only book with large enough print for him to
read. We should not be embarrassed about reading, TV is
another matter, but most good readers are not like my New
Yorker snobbish reader. I think sometimes we are embarrassed
to admit not only what we read but how. Is it that we
believe that if we can train our young boys and girls 
properly they won't inherit our bad habits, like skipping
over or guessing at words we're not sure of, skimming
passages when we get bored, abandoning books that don't
interest us or are simply too difficult or time consuming.
Can we prevent the next generation of readers from adopting
our habits? Our middlebrow tastes in contemporary popular
fiction? Our lowbrow tastes for potboilers? Our consumer
consenting tastes in the pop fiction of the day? Should we?
Will this make them snobbish readers? Or will this make some
illiterate? 

"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately
and all the time, with my eyes hanging out." 	
			---Dylan Thomas