You’re right, Carol, we need a lot more teens to read Dickens and Austen and Melville, and a lot less fuss over Harry Potter. But right now the competition isn’t between classics and pop literature. It’s between books (any books of any kind) and video games, MySpace, Facebook, MTV.com, ESPN.com, YouTube, etc., and, of course, television.

Books are losing, fast, and I see no way to stop it. So what are we left with? I read a Harry Potter book a few years ago and had to fight nodding off throughout. But the sad reality is that youth culture has slid so far downward into puerile visual stimulants that kids who eat up the Conan series, Tarzan, Hardy Boys, Grisham, and so on, as well as Potter, are far beyond their peers.