At NRO today, Thomas Hibbs dismisses the question as to whether the Potter books have improved the reading habits of young people, in light of recent statistics that indicate no general improvement in reading rates in the ten years of the creation of the series. But this was one of the big selling points of the Potter books! Many people wondered about the sensationalistic nature of the series and the fact that it was a lot of cheap thrills couched in formulaic pop-culture, good-evil tropes.

But the answer always came back that it was at least cultivating the reading habit in young people who might not otherwise become readers. Now that there is some evidence that it has not had an effect on young people’s reading rates, Hibbs dismisses the debate over this as “comical.” He claims that the only way to judge is to see if Potter fans specifically become steady readers. But that is only partly true. Given the enormous, near-universal popularity of the series, reading levels should indeed have risen in the ten years of its creation and consumption. It seems pretty obvious that if many more young people were becoming lovers of reading in general, and not just of the Potter books, and continued on in the habit of reading, that fact should be showing up in a rise in children’s reading rates in general. But it hasn’t, and that doesn’t surprise me.

As the series was emerging, one of my nieces recoiled from the books because she found them violent and frightening. She finally did steel her way through as a matter of pride, not really enjoying it. When I mentioned to her that I too thought it was excessively full of violence and sensationalism, she said, rather condescendingly toward me, that’s what everybody loves and why it sells and is popular. Almost as if its selling and being popular were a value above all else. She was invalidating her own recoil from the books in favor of going along with what everyone liked. I had to tell her that because something sells and is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. That exchange further enforced my observations over the Potter books. The popularity of the series comes partly from being popular and being the thing all the young people have to be acquainted with. There is almost a coercive quality about the whole thing, as if any criticism of it, including one’s own reservations, is illegitimate.