The Popularity Of Potter
Color me clueless, but I just don't get the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. I've tried. I really have. Twice I've attempted to read the first book of the series, and twice I've failed miserably to care one iota about young Potter. But I'll admit, that's probably more my fault than Rowling's. Maybe I just chose two bad days to pick up the book. Maybe I'm just too old (though my mother loves all the novels). Maybe I'm just no longer wired that way.
 That's the sad thing for me. I love reading, and I bet if I were ten years old right now, I'd be curled up in bed eagerly flipping the pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. But I'm not ten and I probably will never read that book unless I'm reading it to my own child some day.
I am honestly happy to read about the fuss these books are creating, though. Anything that encourages reading is a good thing. Anything that gets a child to want to read a nine hundred page book is fantastic. I have trouble sometimes convincing students to read a ten page short story, never mind a book as thick as most dictionaries. Maybe I'll never be able to comprehend the importance of "Professor Dumbledore" or "Voldemort," but I do appreciate the importance of getting children to enjoy reading. I just wish all the people who want to ban these books because they feel it promotes witchcraft would just let children be children. Something tells me that reading Harry Potter books will not lead this country into another Dark Age, but listening to people who want to burn these books just might.
So if you want to read about the Order of the Phoenix, then by all means do. If you want to stop someone else from doing so, especially a young person who is on the verge of loving to read, then by all means don't.
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