Silicon Insider: Behind the Birth of eBay
June 26 -- — Coming soon to a Diagon Alley near you …
Last weekend I donated my biannual day to reading the newest Harry Potter book.
At least with the earlier books in the series, you could whip through one with the loss of a single morning and part of an afternoon. But the last couple have been (literally) monstrous tomes and now require at least a couple hours after the midnight purchase, followed by the entire next day until well into the night.
Is it worth it? Yeah, probably. J.K. Rowling has done a pretty good job of looting Lewis, Chesterton and Bullfinch's Mythology. She's constructed a nice clockwork plot. And some of the characterizations are terrific. For example, speaking as the parent of a 12-year-old, Harry Potter does a terrific turn in this one as an obnoxious, confused and ultimately decent teenager. Unfortunately, other characters, notably Dumbledore and the frustratingly uninteresting villain Voldemore, remain as cardboard as ever.
In other words, the new Harry Potter is about as good, and as bad, as the four that came before it.
So, why is J.K. Rowling the most popular novelist on the planet? The greatest contributor to childhood literacy since McGuffey? Most of all, why are millions of adults joining this phenomenon, spending time out of their busy lives on a featherweight Bildungsroman about a British teenage wizard?
The answer, I think, lies beyond Platform Number 9 ¾.
The real glory, I think, of the Potter books is Rowling's genius for creating an alternative reality. Harry's real world life with the Dursley family, besides being a shameless rip-off of Roald Dahl, is both cartoonish and tiresome. You can almost sense that Rowling herself is anxious to get out of there and return to her own imaginative world of Hogwarts, the Weasleys and the London-behind-London of her magic world.
It is this other world, with its odd characters and locales and its strange malleability of space and time, that I think most attracts readers both young and old. And it is this other world that stunned me with the shock of recognition as I read the new Harry Potter last weekend.
You see, I've been there.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
There is a phenomenon, described by cultural historians, of an idea whose time has come. Lately, brain scientists and linguists have taken to calling it a "meme." It is an idea, often expressed as metaphor, that arises in one field of endeavor and soon sweeps across all of society. It becomes the defining notion of that age, coloring everything from scientific theories to the latest trends in the arts.
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