Readers in the WW (was: JKR and "Think of the Children!")

[zgirnius]

No: HPFGUIDX 162092

Carol:
> A sidenote on "Helas, je me suis Transfigure mes Pieds", a play by 
the
> French wizard Malecrit mentioned by zgirnius upthread. Clearly, we
> have another linguistic joke here--a playwright named Malecrit (bad
> critic?) who is presumably a bad judge of good writing. And the 
title,
> which I think translates to "Alas, I've transfigured my feet" 
(please
> correct me if I'm wrong; I took Latin, not French, as my foreign
> language), can only be a farce. (The Lexicon translates "Malecrit" 
as
> "badly written," but I'm basing "crit" on "critic" and similar 
words.

zgirnius:
Never bet against the Lexicon. <g>
Ecrire is the verb to write in French, ecrit is a form of it which 
can mean written. So it is "badly written". 

I still don't think it is logistics that prevent us from seeing Harry 
read for pleasure. I believe he really doesn't, much. Hearing him 
chat about a fictional work of fiction, or read an unnamed one 
instead of practicing Occlumency when he is stressed out, or mention 
one, however silly its name, and so on, would tend to make me view 
him as a reader, as Rowling's descriptions do not. Not that this 
makes me dislike Harry or respect him less; I just see him as 
different from myself in this regard, where (for example) Hdermione 
and younger me might have had this as a trait in common. (I do accept 
the idea of reading history books and other works of non-fiction for 
pleasure, as Hermione's reference to some enormous, dusty tome or 
other suggests she does).

Though I am certainly willing to consider that Harry might have been 
a reader under other circumstances. I've read way too much on the 
importance of fathers/male role models reading to/around boys in 
parenting books to disagree. Somehow I don't see Uncle Vernon making 
the effort (even for Dudders).