FOSTER THAT LOVE

Dear Spike:

The final volume of the Harry Potter chronicles was released tonight. Your mother and I took you to a party at the city library — complete with a tiny lightning bolt drawn on your forehead.

There were hundreds of people there, almost all dressed in costume. There were face painters and jugglers and magicians. But the highlight of the night, for your mother and I, was signing you up for your very own library card. I hope it will become one of your most prized possessions.

You don’t have to enjoy the Harry Potter books (your mother, like millions of others, is addicted to the tales of the boy wizard, while I’m lukewarm on the series) but either way I do hope you’ll learn to love reading. It’s our goal to help foster that love by exposing you to great literature. Thus the card.

I remember speaking with a bookseller around the time of the release of the third installment of the Harry Potter series. She told me that children were coming into her shop for the first time to pick up the Harry Potter books, then returning — again and again — for others. They’d start with something familiar — another book about magic perhaps, or a story about dragons and witchcraft and wizardry — and slowly move on to other works.

Perhaps J.K. Rowling led to J.R.R. Tolken. And J.R.R. Tolken led to C.S. Lewis. And C.S. Lewis led to E.B. White. (You don’t have to go by your initials if you want to be a famous author, by the way, but it appears to help.)

The same week I spoke with that bookseller, I met an old man whose name was Harry Potter. He hadn’t learned to read until he was 19, when someone introduced him to the works of Zane Grey. The cowboy stories — tales of rugged men cutting their destinies out of the land of the old west — inspired his imagination and established a love of reading that he still had when our paths crossed, more than 60 years later.

That’s often how it works with literature. All it takes is one book to get you going. Later on, other books might become your favorites, but you’ll never forget the one.

For me it was Main Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. For you, it might be Harry Potter, or The Edge Chronicles, or the tales of Mistmantle.

The book that chooses you may not be one that inspires people to paint lightning bolts on their children’s heads, or throw parties with face painters, jugglers and magicians.

But if it inspires you, that’s all that matters.

Love,
dad