Saturday morning brought the celebratory release of the new J.K. Rowling novel, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
After five books, maybe it's time to celebrate Harry Potter differently.
Let's read something else.
Remain calm, take that broomstick out of your craw, take off your goofy-ass glasses and please, heed these words:
There are other books worth reading.
This is not to say that Potter fans should take offense. Though I could spend all day administering cheap shots, I won't.
I also won't go as far as to say that parents should keep their children away from J.K. Rowling's work. Many parents are just glad children are reading.
But it's not enough.
With total Internet sales of Rowling's new book exceeding one million orders, added to 200 million copies of Rowling's other books sold throughout 200 countries, it's beyond dangerous.
Reader by reader, Harry Potter is absorbing the world.
My question: What else are these people reading?
Answer: Whatever is popular or celebrity endorsed forms much of what we consider modern essential reading. (Teachers and dorks form the rest.)
Indeed, that is an injurious trend.
When I worked in a bookstore, people would arrive just minutes after Oprah announced her new book. Each time Dr. Phil ordered his minions to spend money, the lines formed.
But Harry Potter was worse. He's everywhere. For months, I saw lines of parents ready to buy precisely one book -- nothing more -- for impatient children.
Certainly, it was the only book that kids wanted. But adults read it, too.
Not one wide-eyed, impressionable, formative mind got a famous work of literature.
The work of J.D. Salinger, one of our greatest living writers (certainly more reclusive than J.K. Rowling), sat quietly. Franny, Zooey and Holden remained unknown to a generation.
Flannery O'Connor, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, hid in plain sight. A good reader is hard to find.
Kurt Vonnegut's work was completely overlooked. And so it goes.
Now, adults are buying an alternate version of the Potter book with a more "adult looking" cover, because they're self-conscious about what they're reading.
Odd, how they're not self-conscious enough to, I don't know, read something else.
Adding insult, CNN compared the new Rowling book's word count to that of the Bible, pointing out that the Bible has more words.
"So, given the choice, which would you read?" CNN might as well have asked as its spiny, leathery-winged demon-body trembled with laughter in the sulfur pits below us.
We're being told what to read, and we're listening. We're not even questioning it. We're not choosing for ourselves.
Maybe it's time we did, but it's difficult to step out of a Harry Potter stampede.
No one can stop the J.K. Rowling bum rush. But we can do one thing:
We can look through the rest of the bookstore. We can stop to look at the books we read in school (or didn't read, but should have). Maybe we could even pick one up.
I'm resigned to the staggering popularity, but not the complacency -- certainly not the ignorance, and definitely not the tragedy of what readers are losing.
If people read one book, it will be "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
But it is imperative for us to read something else too.
Write to John at kingseyeland@bsu.edu
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