"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." - Howard Aiken

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A: Same way I don't comprehend why some people love harry potter. Do you think someone could do their Phd in English on harry potter today? Incomprehensible what the majority love.


B: Well, as a major Harry Potter fan, I can say that a lot of us love it for all sorts of reasons. I'll actually be running my fifth consecutive Harry Potter game at a convention this Easter.

As an expert on children's literature, somebody could easily do their PhD in English on Harry Potter - it's very high quality children's literature drawing upon a very large literary tradition dating back to the mid nineteenth century and is probably the clearest modern incarnation directly in two of the English speaking worlds most dominant children's literature streams.

There's nothing lightweight about Harry Potter - that is what sets it apart from over 99% of children's literature of the post 1970s era, and once reason it is so popular - because it doesn't treat children like ignorant consumers of pop culture, who have to be spoon fed everything.

Frankly, Harry Potter is one of the few things around for kids that is likely to create intelligent, traditionally literate, thinking adults with an appreciation for literature, rather than mindless TV watching zombies who do what the advertising tells them to do.

You're aiming your barbs at the wrong target.


C: Replace "Harry Potter" with "Terry Pratchett", and this statement suddenly rings true.

Certainly my own kids aren't at all interested in Harry Potter, but they voraciously devour anything Discworld I bring near them. Hopefully that will encourage them, when they're older, to eschew the likes of Dan Brown in favour of Umberto Eco.


B: It rings true, anyway.

Most of Pratchett's work is not aimed at children, though certainly it's accessible to many kids. I love Pratchett's work, but it's also of a very particular style which limits how widely it will appeal. It's comedy and humour, and that's great, but there's a great many people who aren't looking for that - especially kids. Too many kids books are funny and nothing else and that creates a situation where many kids are turned off humourous writing unfortunately, because the first stuff they encounter is garbage. 95% or more of kids literature is unfortunately, very low quality.

I've just spent much of the last four years formally studying these areas and looking at what kids read and what they don't read and what creates kids who are interested in literature and what doesn't. I have had to read about 3200 kids books, and I
think I can fairly judge what is and isn't high quality.

I am actually somebody who is working on a higher level thesis based on Harry Potter and it's not because I am stupid or illiterate - it's becauise I am extremly interested in children's literature and the Harry Potter books are a new phenomenon in children's literature - nearly thousand page novels being read by millions of children. And what is more, these are novels that contain far more cultural references - to ancient languages, areas of history that most children have never studied, areas of mythology that are likewise connected to modern education, religious allegory, astronomical references, etc - than virtually any other children's books. Including incidentally, Pratchett's books specifically written for children - his Discworld books are very culture laden, but he really does dumb that down in the Tiffany Aching books.

The fact that your own kids aren't interested in Harry Potter, simply says that it doesn't match their personal reading preferences. That's fine - personal reading preferences are pretty complicated, especially for kids. We don't judge books based on whether a few individual children like them. We base them on a lot more than that..

The thing is - what I am interested in developing is children who read Umberto Eco *AND* Dan Brown. Eco is certainly the vastly superior author, and his works are genuine literature, as opposed to sensational racing pulp, but highly literate adolescents and young adults who read literally hundreds of novels a year, run out of Eco pretty quickly. For that matter they run out of Pratchett in about a month.

A narrow literacy focus on the great canon of literature is probably better than a narrow literacy focus on pulp, but a broad focus that includes far more than just the great canon is better still.

The Harry Potter books first became highly popular among the 'gifted community' - among children with IQs of above 130. That's not to say all smart kids like them, because there's more involved that just intellectual functioning, but they were popular with this group well before they went mainstream. And it was because these were among the first children's books in years that didn't insult their intelligence.

These are the kids who typically become the most literate adults - that's a generalisation, but it is a strong relationship, and the broadest readers among adults.