Potter spotter: Wash Post disses HP, & is it right?

[frantyck]

Hi all, and Happy New Year!

Saw this in today's Washington Post. Bob Levey's column in the Style 
section mentioned Harry Potter. Here's the quote:

"She is the kind of contemplative child whom parents and teachers 
dream of -- a talented student who prefers Dickens and Dumas to 
Harry Potter."

For the full column, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46826-2001Dec31.html

Is Harry Potter the literary equivalent of fast-food? I find it 
makes great toilet and bedtime reading, because, once read, you can 
open any one of the books just about anywhere and close it when the 
task at hand is complete. Is this like fast food in the sense that 
it fills your stomach and fulfills the body's need for sugar or 
cheese or whatever, without feeling like a genuine meal (note the 
stress given to the 'family' or 'sit-down' meal, symbolising so much 
more than just refueling).

I've always thought it interesting that the HP books are so highly 
visual in terms of the way a reader imagines what's going on. There 
are doses of humour, doses of powerful emotion, the sense of being a 
watcher rather than a reader in some ways, very movie-like in the 
way it transmits to the mind. In the age of the movie, and at least 
in the age of the aggressively visually-presented, Rowling very 
effectively stands across that gap between the world of the real 
eyes and that of the mind's eye. Her books do not, by and large, 
depend on the 'quality' of her prose, however that is defined.

Is this why habitual non-readers take to HP? Or why kids like it so 
much? Is it *really* true (the teachers amongst us might know best) 
that kids are drawn (back) to the *habit* of reading because of HP? 
What is it they are stimulated to read? More/other fantasy fiction? 
Anything beyond this?

Or is Levey's attitude in his column a reflection of the 'true' 
reader's sense of reading as a task, a mission, an activity that 
must be participatory and demanding and hinge on a not-purely-
visceral intellectual hunger for edcuation in ways of looking or 
thinking. I don't know if I'm phrasing correctly here. "I read 
because I must" predominating over "I read because it is 
entertaining" -- to oversimplify grossly.

Or is it just that English fiction like that of Dickens and Dumas 
has the veneer of substance and endurance and English-ness, thus is 
bona fide litt.? So, is Rowling the Jeffrey Archer of the children's 
book world?

I wonder if the girl Levey is describing actually *said* that she 
preferred Dickens and Dumas. That "the kind of" device makes me 
wonder. In which case, is Levey merely using imagined extremes to 
illustrate that the child is contemplative rather than, I don't 
know, undiscriminating?

Contemplatively yours,

Rrishi