Harry Day

This isn't supposed to happen anymore. Sure, there were times when it probably seemed that everybody was frantic to read the latest installment of a Charles Dickens novel, and people lined up on the pier in American cities to get the books as they came off the boat.

But that was the 19th century, the era of print. Those who try to describe the Dickens mania usually fall back on the comparison, "like a rock star."

But no rock star, no blockbuster movie director or actor can claim to have the frenzied following of the author of a set of novels about a kid named Harry Potter.

The latest was published Saturday, and the world took notice. There aren't ten novelists in the world who sell as many copies of their novels as John Grisham. And Grisham doesn't sell as many novels in a year as J.K. Rowling did Saturday.

I can't tell you how good the new novel is, even though I bought a copy on Saturday. Margaret is out of town and I'm sworn not to even peek. We were introduced to the Potter novels by a couple who read them aloud to each other, and so we did the same. So our reading begins Tuesday.

However, I did re-read the last one, HARRY POTTER and the ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, all 870 pages in the past two days. Given what's gone on in the world in the past year, the political machinations in the background of this one are even more revealing.

Reading it aloud demonstrates its dramatic strengths, and the humor in its characterizations. Reading it as a novel reveals its literary strengths, the patterns and shadings, the resonances with our world.

Dickens didn't have movies--let alone the movies from his own books-- to compete with. But even though the movies are popular, they don't seem to interfere. Not only are new children reading the books, but children who've grown up with them continue to read the new ones, and re-read them, again and again.

Movies, even rock music have their own influences on these books (it's not just in the movies that Harry looks like he could grow up to be John Lennon), and they are myths and texts for our time. But they've got those old print virtues, and children are reading, and that's not a bad thing. Nor is reconciling the adult with the child within, at least for a few isolated hours.