Nobody is ever too old for story time. My sister is twelve years old, and this summer she pulled Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix off the bookshelf and asked me to read it to her. My mom read books one through four aloud to her, but the nightly reading sessions had petered out a few years ago. Now my sister wanted to finish the series. So I began to read the fifth book to her, right where my mom had left off.
I am quite experienced at reading out loud and doing funny voices. I have four younger cousins, and I work with kids frequently as a job or volunteer work, so I know how to keep an animated voice and draw out all the suspense I can before I turn the page. I also do Speech and Debate at school, and I spent the last year performing a humorous monologue (fittingly, I was doing my own rendition of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka). So as I opened Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, my sister beside me, I was well prepared.
Unfortunately, I had never read a whole novel out loud before, and I soon realized that maintaining a gruff voice as Hagrid for an entire chapter is pretty hard on your vocal chords, and that remembering exactly what voice you used to portray Umbridge a few chapters ago is quite difficult. I also had the embarrassment of thinking that a line was said by Hermione, starting it out in a girlish voice, and having to abruptly change to a growl as I realized it was, in fact, Mad-Eye Moody who was speaking. But overall, I enjoyed myself immensely. Not only that, but I gained an important insight about the Harry Potter series, and writing itself.
There is something about reading a book out loud that forces you to pay attention to the language, the way the sentences are crafted. I can't skim over lines the way I do when I am reading silently inside my head. When I was forced to concentrate on every word, to say every syllable out loud, I could ignore nothing. I found myself appreciating descriptions that I had never noticed before, such as, "the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake..." I also found myself picking up on all the ways that J.K. Rowling broke the rules.
I have been taking writing classes and going to writing summer camps since I was ten years old. Every writing teacher has told me to avoid cliche descriptions such as "emerald green grass," use an expansive vocabulary (say "delicious" instead of "good," even if it destroys the rhythm of my poem), and never, ever use adverbs. Right now I am writing a novel of my own. Well, maybe not a novel. Maybe it's just a really long story. But either way, it's 40,000 words of action and intricate plot. For a while I found myself unable to write it because I was positively choked with rules. And then I read Harry Potter out loud to my sister. And guess what? J.K Rowling uses cliche (or at least common) descriptions. There is barely a sentence of dialogue that doesn't contain an adverb. And her vocabulary includes words like "stupid" and "weird." Maybe it's odd that I was surprised by this. After all, Harry Potter is nothing if not mainstream literature. It was written to appeal to the masses and it did, most successfully. But it's more than that to me. For years of my childhood as an aspiring writer I wanted to be J.K. Rowling. I wanted to write a gripping story with enchanting characters and a complex fantasy world. I spent years looking up to her, and though my goals shifted somewhat as I grew older, I would never forget the deep imprint that Harry Potter left on me.
And suddenly, I was able to write. I was able to take up my own 40,000 word story with enthusiasm and pour my soul into writing it, using adverbs to my heart's delight. Now, I'm not saying that Harry Potter is a literary masterpiece. Harry Potter is built on a history of folklore and legends a mile high, with barely an original idea. It's not challenging; it plays into the human desire for a clear good to defeat a clear evil, and for love to conquer everything. It's not Catch-22 and Hemingway would probably hate it. But it does have a purpose, even beyond the need to entertain and delight its audience.
A recent study showed that people who grew up reading Harry Potter showed "greater levels of acceptance for out-groups, higher political tolerance, less predisposition to authoritarianism, greater support for equality, and greater opposition to the use of violence and torture," regardless of the views of their parents or other variables. The children who grew up reading these books (specifically the ones who liked the books and identified positively with the character Harry Potter) have grown into voting age adults whose political ideals have been shaped by a book character. This influence is easily explained. When a child reads a book that grabs their attention and they identify strongly with the main character, they imbibe the ideas of the character on a more emotional level than if they were learning about issues on the news. In the Harry Potter series, Harry sticks up for his friend Hermione when Draco Malfoy calls her a "mudblood" (an insult for someone whose parents aren't wizards). The most evil character in the book, Voldemort, is discriminatory towards "muggles" and "mudbloods." The Cruciatus Curse, a curse that is used to torture enemies, is illegal in the wizarding world and its effects are described in painful detail (the parents of one character, Neville, were tortured into insanity by this curse). Overall, the "bad guys" are discriminatory, authoritarian, and willing to torture or kill their enemies. The "good guys" are, for the most part, alienated by the mainstream wizarding world, showing tolerance and general disgust towards violence.
So yes, maybe Harry Potter does use adverbs and maybe it's not very subtle at all. It's not meant to be. It was written to entertain kids, and, as the series grew more serious, adults as well. But it also taught a generation of young readers the values of acceptance and compassion. I have always known that the books I read as a child weren't pointless. I have always felt that they had more honesty and substance to them than some adult novels. Reading Harry Potter out loud to my sister (perhaps slowly changing her outlook on the world) helped me realize that it's okay to write a book that creative writing professors would scoff at. I know that I'm not writing the next Harry Potter, I'm not even sure if my book will ever be published. But I would have abandoned it altogether if my sister hadn't asked me to read to her.
Resources:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/08/magic-effect-how-harry-potter-has-influenced-political-values-millennial-generation
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