Harry Somebody

I'm all for it, but I admit the Harry Potter craze has not swept me up. I read a few of the books and thought they were fresh and entertaining, but they didn't grab me. It's an individual thing.

I didn't think much of it, except to generally be in favour of everyone reading books and enjoying themselves and writers getting rich, until - as usual - Stephen King said it best.

Think how it must be for all the kids who were 8 when Harry debuted in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with its cartoon jacket and modest (500 copies) first edition. Those kids are now 18, and when they close the final book, they will be in some measure closing the book on their own childhoods — magic summers spent in the porch swing, or reading under the covers at camp with flashlights in hand, or listening to Jim Dale's recordings on long drives to see Grandma in Cincinnati or Uncle Bob in Wichita.

and

[R]ereading is a great pleasure, but it's not the bated-breath, what's-gonna-happen-next suspense that Potter readers have enjoyed since 1997. And, of course, Harry's audience is different. It is, in large part, made up of children who will be experiencing these unique and rather terrible feelings for the first time. But there's comfort. There are always more good stories, and now and then there are great stories. They come along if you wait for them...

This column made me positively teary with nostalgia. All those lucky kids, going through that for the first time! The same thing I went through with the Narnia books and The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Judy Blume's Blubber (nasty though it is) and The Great Gilly Hopkins and that long, great summer I spent reading everything Tolkien. The other girls my age were going through it with Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, the Anne of Green Gables books, and A Wizard of Earthsea. I lost entire days to Tolkien, just barely lifting my head to eat and not really aware of what was going on in the supposed "real world".

And those were the days when "Young Adult" was hardly a genre, let alone a hot one. I look at the YA shelves in the bookstores today and wish I was 12 again, just for the summer vacations.

King is right. Sure, nothing is quite like those first books, but then you get to be a grownup, and you get to read romance, sci-fi, mystery, history, fantasy, paranormal, and whatever else turns your crank. The ghosts and wonders don't go away, they just get more grown-up.

You can find them. I know I have.