Harry Potter and the dirty hippy libruls

Doctor Black has some thoughts on Harry Potter:

Taste

Glancing through the now quite long Harry Potter thread at a Yglesias's place I'm rather amused. Or bemused. Or something.

I always find it quite fascinating when people seem to get angry because you don't like stuff they like or like stuff that they don't like. It's one thing if someone's making a definitive claim such as "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the greatest novel in the English language since Middlemarch," or similar. Such statements can inspire genuine discussion and/or argument. But that's something different than "I like Harry Potter" being responded to with "You're an idiot for liking Harry Potter."

Most of us like and enjoy a full range of stuff from low brow to high brow and everything in between. High culture, pop culture, trash culture are all part of the mix. I'm sure there are a few of those rarified individuals who are never sullied by anything that the rest of us mere mortals enjoy, but who the hell wants to talk to them.

[via Eschaton]

Initially I was scared to go over to Yglesia's and see what the dirty fucking hippies are saying about Potter. My fears were justified; the comments are border on nauseating. What struck me as so odd was how the commenters lump Potter together with mainstream adult fiction. Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Brothers have made so much money on Harry, Hermione and Ron that people forget the novels are juvenile fiction. It's like diehard fans who fail to make the distinction between an 800-page novel and a 2-hour movie. The novels are yoot fiction first; if adults want to read them, that's great. Better still, when adults and yoot share the experience. That's the part that Dr. Black and the dirty fucking hippies don't get. And I don't think I'm the one to explain it to them. I'm a dad, I've read stuff simply to understand where my kids are coming from. When it happens to work out that what they read is actually good stuff that I enjoy, I just thank the goddess and leave it at that. After all, it could be another "Goosebumps" novel.

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