I love books, and reading books, and thinking about books, and even just looking at books in bookstores. Reading is just about my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. As a kid I used to believe that the worst fate anyone could suffer was a life deprived of books. I know better now – there are far worse nightmares to be caught in. But a life without books is still hard for me to imagine.
When you are a bookworm, falling into a new story brings you much the same rush of pleasure you experience when you are infatuated with another person. It’s consuming. There is a part of you that stays in this world, driving, talking, folding the laundry. And there is another part, not the rest of you, maybe, but an awfully significant piece, that disappears into the story and remains there, suspended, until the book can be picked up once again, and the story resumed.
This is why it’s hard to live with a bookworm. We’re forever being called away to places that only we can see. And then, when we try to bring the story back to you, to share it, it seems to come out either too flat, or a little blurry, like someone else’s vacation photos.
This summer, I’ve been away in my head for weeks, almost totally lost in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s so amazing that I’m all but going door-to-door telling people to read it. If you’ve been saying, hey – where can I find a great, sweeping adventure story that dares to grapple with love, theology, and particle physics? – then these are the books for you. I’m talking especially to you, my fellow Rowling enthusiasts, all so sad over the release of the final Harry Potter. Whatever will you read now? Philip Pullman, that’s what, my bookish buddies. You’re going to love His Dark Materials. The three books, in order, are: Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass. And yes, you did just see a commercial for a movie of the same title); The Subtle Knife; and The Amber Spyglass. Now don’t get all I-don’t-like-science-fiction or I-m-not-reading-a-kid-book on me. His Dark Materials is great reading, period. I can’t wait to read it again, and I just finished the final book about twelve hours ago. That’s how good it is. It doesn’t just whisk you away to an entirely new world – it whisks you off to multiple new worlds, each so fully and beautifully imagined that you’ll have a lump in your throat from knowing you’ll never really get to visit any of them. I’m going to warn you, however, that if the absence of God or religion in J.K. Rowling’s books upsets you, then you might want to leave His Dark Materials on the shelf. Because Pullman pretty much takes on all of organized religion and theology in a way that makes a pack of wand-waving Hogwarts kids look like a Sunday school field trip in comparison.
Speaking of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the debate over whether or not HP lures young readers away from Christianity and into the dark world of witchcraft and wizardry...On the one hand, I think, what a pack of nutters. It’s only a book! And on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than a book. This makes it an argument worth having. All the more so since the thing we’re all so fired up about is a book, and not the usual vapid crap that fills our tabloid press. Hurray! It’s damn near a miracle.
J.K. Rowling’s books deal with the nature of good and evil, with morality and responsibility. Yes, the story is set in a magical world – and wouldn’t it be amazing to fly about on a broom? But that’s not why readers respond so passionately to Harry Potter. His story resonates because it’s so very human. Like Harry, don’t we all at some point have to choose between what we know is right over what we think might be easy? The characters in the Harry Potter universe may call themselves witches or wizards or giants or centaurs or what have, but they are no different from us. Some are kind, generous, and altruistic. Some are sinister, selfish, and foul. Their values vary, and their motives are mixed - just like here in reality, where, as best I can tell, almost no one feels the need to cloak him or herself in a veil of magic before doing something completely rotten. Just look at all the unspeakable things we manage to accomplish without casting a single spell.
I’m not criticizing those who believe that the Potter books are anti-Christian and dangerous for young minds. A book can shake your faith. Try reading Yaffa Eliach’s meticulously detailed There Once Was a World, a book about the Nazi extermination of an entire Jewish village. Or Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. These are stories that actually happened, right here, in this world, and nothing magical about it. Look at the evil we’re capable of, and maybe even worse, our apparent indifference to so much of it. If that doesn’t shake your faith, then surely your faith can’t be threatened by a make-believe boy wizard-in-training, right?
Whatever you think of Harry Potter, you have the right to read or not read whatever you like. That freedom is our birthright as Americans. But it begins and ends with you. Which means you’ll need to mind your business when it comes to what I choose to read. Likewise, what you deem unfit for your children might be absolutely fine for mine. I’ll go ahead and make those decisions for me, and you go ahead and make them for you, thanks very much. When I hear people pontificating about the need to restrict access to - or God forbid ban – Rowling’s (or any other author’s) books, I want to scream, then cry, then scream some more. Censorship is profoundly anti-American. The right to free speech is just bedrock. It’s at the core of who we are. And if you don’t like it, please – make petitions, go march in the streets, write letters to the editor, get yourself on TV. Because that’s who we are too. Freedom to dissent is freedom of speech. Something it seems like the people who complain the loudest about what the rest of us are reading or looking at have conveniently forgotten.
Lamar (aka The People's Movie Critic) has a co-worker at Budweiser who's got the right philosphy. Taterhead says, "What you eat don't make me fat." Amen to that, brother.
