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Joline Gutierrez Krueger: Harry Potter and the shrinking pool of teen readers

By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Friday, July 20, 2007

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What if Harry Potter is a goner?

What are we to make of things if in J.K. Rowling's madly anticipated seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the Boy Who Lived dies?

Think of the children, for God's sake. It would be like the Easter Bunny getting whacked.

Think of all of us. In a world beset by an increasingly deadly and inane war in Iraq, looming al-Qaida threats, a lunatic in the White House and terror in the grocery stores where even the spinach and dog food can kill us, now is not the time to let evil triumph over good.

Now is not the time to lose Harry.

Not that I know his death is a done deal. I'm no Professor Trelawney gazing into the future, and thus I have to wait until the book is released at 12:01 a.m. July 21 like the rest of you to learn Harry's fate.

And then again, there is the Internet and the various Web sites that have posted photocopies of all 784 pages of the book.

Those spoilers.

I note, too, the gambling site Wagerweb.com has Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort as the odds-on winners to succumb by book's end.

But this is beside the point. Whether Harry is gold in the death pool doesn't change the fact he is leaving us. It's the last book, the last Quidditch match, the last time we'll take that train to Hogwarts, and that makes me sad.

We must say goodbye.

We have a history, Harry and I.

It began in 1999 when my then-father-in-law broke from his usual gifting of check or cash and presented us with a boxed set of the first three Potter books.

Perhaps it's the journalist in me that shapes my preference for reality-based reading over fantasy or science fiction, but the Potter books did not intrigue me.

And I am sorry to say that my children — the oldest two were 6 at the time — have not acquired, either by genetics or osmosis, my love of the written word.

But the Potter buzz was insistent. News accounts were roundly praising the boy wizard for magically inspiring kids to read books again.

Finally, one evening I and my oldest son, the only one awake, curled up together on the couch and cracked open "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

We were hooked.

I read the book aloud, assigning voices in my poor rendition of a British accent to each character.

On occasion, my other children would stop to listen, but it was that oldest son, the Boy Who Wouldn't Read, who faithfully hung on every word, even when the words started to jumble together as I fell asleep, reading.

For a time, it seemed the Harry magic had also spilled onto other books my son was suddenly picking up: the "Charlie Bone" series, the Gary Paulsen books, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl.

But at the forefront, it was always Harry.

When the new Potter books came out, my son and I willingly went without sleep to attend a midnight release parties at one of the Albuquerque bookstores to be among the first to get our copy.

But times change. Harry has grown up and so has my son, who is now the beastly age of 14. ON July 21, I am not altogether sure we will attend a release party — though I have ordered the book through Amazon.

For him, the magic of reading has once again vanished, unless the words are on a computer game.

He is among the kiddos a National Endowment of the Arts survey coming this fall is talking about when it reports that teens, even those who have grown up with Harry Potter, are once again just not reading.

So, if there are no more Potter books, well, it doesn't take a wizard to figure out the troubling prospects ahead.

This generation of nonreaders are the goners in a real sense.

I suppose it's too great a burden for one wizard, one author, to continue giving us stories forever. The prospect of reading "Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis" does not thrill.

But it's been fun while it lasted.

And if this is to be our last dance together, let us enjoy it as much or more than we did when we first set off from Privet Drive and learned to fly, to make magic, to read.

Let us all make it out alive.