The Harry Potter Phenomenon

Though you couldn't pay me to be 20 again, I sometimes wish I had been born a little later.  Here's why: the way the teen and tween population viewed reading changed dramatically in the years after Harry Potter.  When I was growing up, it was spectacularly uncool to be excited about a book.  I distinctly remember a girl holding up my copy of A Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis and using it to mock me to the rest of the class.  I may have grown up with other avid readers, but they were closeted.

Fast forward to today.  You can see even the cool kids make references to the Hunger Games and Twilight (the series, not the movies).  The ones who spend a lot of time in the library still have cadres of friends.  During the summer, young people abound in the library, many of whom are dying to get the next book in a beloved series.  In a strange twist of fate, our community's middle school queen bees wave to me, the community librarian, in public.  I have finally achieved the social status my twelve year old self was dying for.  

It is no longer uncool to read, and though many young people don't know this, we have the Harry Potter series to thank for it.  Harry Potter was the literary phenomenon that rocked our society.  Kids and adults read it. Everyone talked about it.  Suddenly, if you weren't familiar with Harry Potter, you weren't with it.

In the years following Harry Potter's popularity, children's literature exploded.  Where you would once find one meager shelf of "children's chapter books" at the bookstore--ranging from The Velveteen Rabbit to Sweet Valley High, you now would find ranges of stuff, now divided between "middle readers" and "young adults" (The New York Times Books section, the final holdout, finally divided its bestseller list of "children's chapter books" into middle and young adult sections about a year ago).  Young adult science fiction and fantasy grew exponentially, and was eventually followed by most other genres.  Now there are books for reluctant readers, books for video game enthusiasts, graphic novels that are not about superheroes, and even young adult books for adults.  

I firmly believe the world is a better place for this.  The first post Harry Potter generation is now coming of age, and they are some of the most creative, compassionate, socially responsible, and imaginative young people we have seen in awhile.  And yes, I am familiar with the bellyaching about millennials and their short attention spans/ lack of respect for personal privacy/ poor spelling/ poor verbal communication skills, an opinion that is repeated in different guise with every generation that comes of age.  It's hard to deny that young people create more, write more, and do more for the world they live in.  I'd like to think that Harry Potter, and his help returning reading to mainstream juvenile society, had something to do with that.