As a kid, I never read novels, graphic or otherwise. My brother read comic books, choose-your-adventure stories, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, an assortment of Afrocentric tomes from Black Arts Plus, down on Parsons Avenue, and more. A good friend of mine, even in elementary school, read 400-page Dragon Lance fantasies, sometimes in a matter of a few days. I couldn’t fathom reading a book that long. I wanted to play basketball, or watch a movie, or read something more to the point: Guinness Books of World Records, encyclopedias, The Gospel of Matthew, or Beckett Football Card Magazine.
Needless to say, I missed out on an entire generation, now two, of stories read by many children in the past few decades. From R.L. Stine and Stephen King to J.K. Rowling, I read next to nothing that had “Bestseller” written on the dust jacket (an attitude further affirmed in my years as an English major). I loved the idea of kicking back for an afternoon with a book, getting wrapped up in the story, lost to the world. I think the only book this happened with was The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and even then, I had a hard time following it, and wasn’t quite sure what was going on by the end, though it did feel exciting. Beyond that, I think I read The Chamber by John Grisham, in one of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (do they still make those?) that house four or five novels in one volume. I thought the book would never end. That’s not a knock on Grisham, but it just wasn’t for me. At the time, though, I thought, “If so many people love this stuff, why don’t I? Am I not literary?” I find it interesting now that in all those years as a as a kid, when the things that teachers and other adults told me were great books—like Dickens—didn’t move me, I thought there must be something amiss in me, not the books themselves. Now, of course, I know it isn’t one or the other—some books are a fit for a specific reader, others aren’t. It’s really that simple.
I’ve been going back to read some of the things I missed out on as a kid, or as what is now commonly known as a young adult. This past week, I read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, probably a bit slower than I would have read it as a 12-year-old anxiously awaiting the release of each sequel, but pretty quickly considering that I have a lot more going on now than I did when I was 12. In some ways, I feel I’m more in touch with being a kid now than I was when I was a kid (my two year old daughter helps immensely with this, I’m sure). As a kid, I was always trying to be smart for my age, read ahead, be wise, be older or more mature, perhaps, in part, trying to keep up with that brother I mentioned, who was nearly five years older, and smarter than his age himself. Impossibly, I wanted to be a prodigy when I grew up. Now, I’m somewhat grown-up, and I must say, though I’ve been literarily trained to abhor clichés and abundant clarity and adverbs and utter tidiness in narrative, that reading the third Harry Potter book was a sheer pleasure.
From a book I would have completely ignored as a kid, this man has learned something about world-building, about how an author makes characters that people young and old can root for and believe in. I remember a few years ago, I was teaching a class about the most controversial topics imaginable, dissecting American culture in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, discrimination, religion, etc. There were some heated debates, but none as heated as when one student attacked the Harry Potter books as worthless rubbish. Instantly, nearly half the group of 20-year-olds launched into a defense of the books, and for the first time I saw the depth of the emotional connection people felt to the story.
I wouldn’t defend the books against attacks by anyone who didn’t like them, but I will say that having read a few of them now, there’s a part of me that wishes I could have been a kid when they came out, and grown up with the characters. I’m reminded of the stories (many of them on film) that I loved the most as a child—not simply the ones I never wanted to end, or to which I wanted there to be a sequel, but the ones that I wished were real. Loving a story so much that you want the very fabric and nature of the real world to change so that the story can be accommodated here: that is the kind of effect I would one day like a book of my writing to produce. If it’s a bestseller too, well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.