Bud the Teacher

    This is a little less timely than I would have liked, but I’ve been working through quite a hefty "to read" pile.  (You can check out my online "toread" pile, if you’d like - if anything on there’s no good, let me know so I can save myself the trouble!)
    I’ve quite enjoyed reading and re-reading Stephen King’s piece "The last word on Harry Potter" from Entertainment Weekly, where he writes a regular column on pop culture.  In the piece, he speaks to the successes of J.K. Rowling’s series as well as her strengths as a writer.  (One big one, according to King, is she allowed her characters to get older.)  He also writes about how strong many kids’ reading habits actually seem to be, and closes beautifully:

But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire,
right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to
cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious
”literary novels” each year. While the bigheads have been predicting
(and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been
supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the
adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman’s
challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider
adventures, Peter Abrahams’ superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the
stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must
not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants.
Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling’s
jovial John the Baptist?

I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids
are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on
writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story
(important) and do it without talking down (more important) or
resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the
field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the
traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.

Worth your time.