As a speedreader, I take some offence at the suggestion that speedreaders dont get anything out of a book except gratification from getting to the end. I LOVE reading. I own many books, all of them read many times. To me, to dispose of a book is a capital crime. However, like everyone else in this world my time is limited with many drains on my attention. As a teenager I had plenty of time to curl up with a book; now as a working mother it is a luxury I get one or two times a year. I love reading so much, that I CANT put a book down once I start, hence the need for speedreading! It also gives me ongoing enjoyment, as everytime I re-read a book, I get something new out of it (racing through does by necessity skim over some things)

Ours loved poetry. Much of it, written by some of the world's best poets, is very light and silly but it entertains and creates an appetite for more and perhaps more wholesome fodder.

What Ms Pringle needs to accept is that even comics are useful if they get children reading.

JKR is a storyteller and a very good one at that. A good yarn is supposed to move at a rapid pace, what modern kid's hero struggles with Shakespearian soliloquoys, baring the very depths of his soul when there are dragons (maybe like Ms Pringle) at large?

A table would be very boring if every dish was an over-rich pudding filled with suet, fruit and spices. Anyhow, most children like jelly sprinkled with Smarties and that's children for you.

I suspect that Harry Potter has brought many children to books whose parents would never have read a book themselves, let alone read to the children.

I wonder what the frowning Ms Pringle thinks of Dr Suess?

Quote:

I wonder what the frowning Ms Pringle thinks of Dr Suess?
Posted by Cornflower, Saturday, 28 July 2007 9:06:56 PM

Cornflower, do you mean Dr Seuss?
(to check spelling see: http://www.catinthehat.org/)

Which sort of makes a point, Dr Seuss wrote basic children's' books for very young readers. Contrary to post-modernist thought, 'Dr Seuss' is not comparable to Shakespeare, or Vonnegut, or Eric Blair (aka George Orwell).

Whilst I am sure that Theodor Seuss Geisel could write excellent English literature he is mainly known for his children's books. They are just one stepping stone to reading deeper and more difficult literature.

No literate and normally intelligent adult would chose the works of Dr Seuss as the literature of choice to inspire them, to cause them to look at the world differently.

People grow out of Dr Seuss, so why in the world are adults so potty about HappyPotty? (maybe people should consider 1 Corinthians 13:11)

I have recently had Internet contact with a young woman who used Shakespeare as a source of inspiration for an HSC artwork, involving the death of Ophelia. An intelligent 15 year old, properly taught and guided, is able to read and understand the questioning about existence raised in the play 'Hamlet'. The famously misquoted 'To be or not to be' soliloquy is Hamlet pondering his own suicide. Does HappyPotty really ask the questions that are confronted in the timeless literature that is available? In 100 years who will remember what a muggle is? HappyPotty will go the way of 'Boys Own Annual' 1917 edition.

Speed reading? Yes, important - speed reading can be an absolute boon, but I am just glad that I didn't speed read Hardy's Return of the Native when I was 16, because I was so disappointed when I finished it, I just wanted it to go on and on.

I sense a touch of intellectual arrogance here...I am better than you because I have read Austen, Dickens, Hardy etc - the classics no less!
According to those afflicted by intellectual arrogance these works border on perfection. It's great literature! Or is it?
I can remember attending an evening once at which the late Alan Marshall was speaking. He was being ferried around by the late Derek Whitelock. During the course of the after-speech questions the subject of Patrick White came up and Alan Marshall admitted he had never read any. Derek then asked the question as to whether anyone in the room had read any White. There was one lone voice, "Only because I had to". So, the guy got a Nobel Prize for literature...but, who reads him? How can literature be great if people do not read it? Surely one of the marks of great literature is that many people want to read it for the sheer pleasure of reading it. They will seek it out and not read it just because they are required to do so.

Thank you for the comments! I have written a few pieces for OOL, but none has attracted the level of personal vitriol as this piece on Harry Potter. That is quite surprising to me, as I have written on abortion and racism, topics about which people feel, and rightly feel, very strongly indeed. So while I am disturbed by the personal comments, perhaps they reflect in a distorted way some things that are valuable: that people still feel very strongly about literature, and that many of us agree that books do have power. As our universities become more and more like intellectual wastelands rather than places of learning (developments that do make me and many of my finer colleagues “miserable”), these things are hopeful signs.

But no, Danielle, in general I am not miserable. And yes, Cornflower, I do think, like Charles Buxton, that it is important for children to be happy, but making children happy is a very different thing from keeping them amused. (Charles Buxton himself seems to have thought that freedom was more important than happiness.) Yes, Pericles, I have read all the Harry Potter books except the final one, or what I hope is the final one (a glance at the last chapter of the final book leads me to think that there is a “Son of Harry Potter” in the works). So when I say that the book are written in a dull and cliché-written style, I am speaking in my own voice, although I am not the first person to say that of course (Harold Bloom and AS Byatt being much more eminent voices along similar lines). I should add however, that in reading the first four books aloud, I would often get to the end of a chapter and realise that I had not a clue what I had just read. And when I read the first four books aloud, I was never asked by the listening child to read any part of them again.

Have exceeded word limit, have to split reply, and sorry can't reply to all comments. Helen

part 2...

I also thought a bit yesterday about Yvonne’s metaphor of the Maccas meal. The analogy only goes so far in regard to Harry Potter: both are poor nutrition, in the one case as food for the body and in the other as food for thought. But I have never heard anyone say how wonderful Maccas meals are because they have got children eating again, and I have never heard anyone claim that eating Maccas leads children on to eating and appreciating good food. As Hamlet so perceptively notes, sometimes it is important to rediscover our hunger – rather than just stuffing our bodies or minds with pap. In my experience, as a person, a writer and a teacher, boredom is usually a sign of overstuffed minds rather than hungry ones.
Helen