Harry Potter

[Dave Monroe]

You know, I read all sorts of weird stuff, and not "just" "kids'" stuff, when
I was a kid ... Dr. Seuss, Encyclopedia Brown, The Great Brain, Ingri and
Edgar D'Aulaire, indeed, anything on Greco-Roman, Norse or Egyptian mythology
I could find, biographies of sports stars (Bobby Orr, Johnny Unitas, Lew
Alcinder, people like that ... but I neither watched nor played sports), the
Guinness Book of World Records, anything about freaks, anything about
warplanes ... Tolkien, obsessively, no other fantasy stuff, but lots o' SF,
Herbert, Pohl, Ellison (and we're talking ca. 6th grade, frighteningly
enough) ... Orwell and Huxley ... but, you know, I read The Crying of Lot 49
around that era because it was mentioned in either The Making of Star Trek
(Stephen Witfield?  It's been a LONG time) or David Gerrold's book about the
making of "The Trouble with Tribbles" ... which had to have left some scars,
but ... but, well, I tend to agree, just about any reading can, potentially,
at least, be good reading ... I think 60s-70s Marvel and DC (and the
occasional Quality weirdness) got me into as much interesting stuff as
anything, so ... though I have only relatively recently been catching up onm
such alleged "childhood favorites" as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or
The Three Musketeers or Don Quixote or Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter or ...
Verne, Wells, Hawthorne, Fennimore Cooper, Scott,  whoever ... but how DID
these end up being "children's books"?  That adventure factor, of course,
but, well, if only kids were reading that stuff today ...