Friday 20 July 2007

From Potter To Plato

Coming home tonight i saw a witch sitting on the kerb sipping something out of a flask. A bit further along there was a wizard with a long white beard leaning against a wall chatting to another wizard.
After checking i was still awake it suddenly dawned on me that the reason there was so many strange sights about tonight was the release of the final Harry Potter book.
I have not read any of JK Rowling's books and only saw the first film because we were given free tickets but anything that can inspire children to queue up outside a bookshop of all places has to be good.
In an era of iPods and Playstations, i love the idea that a good old fashioned book can so grasp the imagination of kids and encourage them to get there nose into a book.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh novel in the series, is expected to be the biggest and fastest-selling book ever written. Water stone's predicts that on the first day alone the book will sell more than two million copies in Britain and more than 10 million worldwide. Books have inspired forces for both good and bad and can be powerful instruments, tools, and weapons so if Rowling can get kids engaged in reading again it would of been worth hearing kids shouting 'Wingardium Leviosa' every 30 seconds for the past 10 years.

4 comments:

Paula said...

It's great that the Potter books have encouraged a love of reading in zillions of kids worldwide. Lit'ry snobs miss the point when they talk about the books being crap. I began the first one and know that the writing isn't all that, but SO WHAT? The point is that kids are reading these and (hopefully) will want to read other books now too. Sure, there's much better literature out there for kids to read, but they like Potter. It's a good thing.

Anonymous said...

The same people who criticize the Potter books on literary grounds probably grew up on Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

O' Tim said...

Nope. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien here, Joe. Vastly superior literature. But no, I don't miss the point as I agree with Miz UV on the "it's for the kids" grounds. J.K. is thumbs up for that and for pissing off all those paranoid Christians.

O' Tim said...

Ha! Comment word verification:

yewal

Kin I git an AMEN?