Humiliation

The British author David Lodge once invented a game called Humiliation in which educated people try to out-do each other by naming classic books they have not read, but which they think everyone else has. “That’s not a very fun game!” You might think, and you would be right, but in his novel, Changing Places, which you should not read until you are much older and a little more boring, the game is played by academics (people who work at universities), and one of them, Howard Ringbaum, wins the game and loses his job as a professor of English, by admitting he has never read Hamlet by Shakespeare.

Now, I’m not a professor of literature and I have read Hamlet – at least I think I have, it’s kind of long and has lots of weird words in it, but I seem to remember I wrote an essay on it once and I do know that pretty much everybody dies, so I must at least have opened it up and looked at it, so that’s got to count for something! – but, and here’s the biggie, I am a librarian in a primary school and, until I came back this year, I could have won the game humiliation with other children’s librarians, and perhaps lost my job, by saying I had never read…

…Harry Potter!

Now, that’s kind of understandable in a way because, if I’m not as old as Dumbledore, I’m still pretty old, and I was old enough not to be reading children’s books when Harry Potter was first published. That was way back in 1997. I was studying sound engineering in a college in an old car factory in the English Midlands waiting until my band took off and I never had to work again – well, I was waiting to form a band, and maybe to learn guitar, but these were minor hurdles that stood in my way and I was pretty keen – and so I didn’t really look up from my copy of Kerrang for long enough to notice some kiddie book about wizards.

Ok, maybe I exaggerate. I was reading stuff. I was reading some of the books you are supposed to read, and some of the books you should read, and some of the books some people probably think you shouldn’t read. I had gone to the library regularly as a kid, and had carried on then, picking up books by Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Heller, Alice Munroe, Douglas Coupland, and others I hope you too might discover when you are older. Some of these names were as important to me as the names of the bands I listened to at the time. Still, I didn’t yet know about J. K. Rowling, who must now be one of the most famous names in literature.

That came later. When I went to university a few years later, everybody was reading Harry Potter. By then it was a series. The third book had been published. By then, too, I had become a keen reader. I would read Chekhov, Turgeniev, Dostoevsky and other miserable classics of Russian literature. I read Irish plays and American short stories, long French novels about women who run off after their doctor husbands do a bad job of chopping somebody’s leg off, but I didn’t read children’s books about wizards.
Everybody was reading children’s books about wizards. Why would I do the same as everybody else? You see, I had a fairly fixed mindset that if everybody liked something, then that something was probably rubbish. If everybody was listening to Coldplay, for example, then Coldplay must be a bit rubbish.

The danger with this kind of thinking is that it is quite often true: everybody was listening to Coldplay, and Coldplay are kind of rubbish. What then happens though is that you think it’s true always and miss out on things that everybody you know is sharing and enjoying and which they will grow up together with. Sometimes this isn’t such a big problem, and the other, more hard-to-find, things you find because you don’t like listening to Coldplay everywhere you go, more than make up for missing out on all the rubbish they filled up albums with between the four half–decent songs they wrote. But now and again, you miss out on something special.

So where does Harry Potter come in to all of this? Did I enjoy the book more than I would enjoy listening to Coldplay’s back catalogue? Yes, as it happens. It is a children’s book, and I don’t think it’s going to compete with Chekhov or Alice Munro, Gogol or Bohumil Hrabal and those other Czech authors I have discovered since first coming to Prague in 2004. It is also true that it borrows a lot from other, perhaps more original, children’s books. But what is important is that it is readable. It has some very strong characters, and, on finishing that first book, you feel that you know them, and I can imagine that you really want to read on and find out more. Certainly, I have got the second book next to me at the library now, ready to take it out and continue with the series when I am nodding asleep on the metro to and from work. It is entertaining, and it is undemanding, and it is escapist, and, though it will never be the only type of book I want to read, I know that there have been hundreds of conversations with some of my best friends, people I have grown up with, which I have been excluded from before, and which I will now be able to join in with. Whether it is completely original or not, whether better children’s books have been written or not, all these adventures of Harry and Hermione, Ron and Hagrid, are something we will share in future.