Senior Book Editor Ron Charles has a column in Sunday's Washington Post that makes several assertions about adults and reading that pretty much annoyed me on every level. He starts off his piece, entitled "Harry Potter and the Death of Reading" by explaining that he and his daughter are both sick of the series. He doesn't understand why other adults seem to enjoy it so much, writing, "I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism."

I think that means that all of us adults who read Rowling's books (or basically any books for kids) for our own pleasure are immature. After all if Charles' little girl was bored by the time they hit Book IV then for adults to continue with the series to the final book must mean something significant about us - it must mean something deep and dark and telling.

We probably eat kid's cereal too. And watch cartoons. And don't have full time jobs or own homes or pay bills on time. Harry Potter is just a symptom of what is wrong with us - our reading material reveals our true nature! Beware of adult Potter fans! We will not make good spouses or parents!

Okay, I'm exaggerating but you get the idea. You can not judge a person based on what they read because that is only one small part of who they are. And maybe when life is hard in a million other ways, you will read about a boy wizard for some fun or because you want to see what all the fuss is about or maybe - just maybe - because you like the story.

Perish the thought.

Adults reading Harry Potter is just the tip of the iceberg for Charles however, just a paragraph or two later he dusts off that wonderful NEA study that revealed a few years ago that the death of literary reading was upon us. Charles is not so surprised by the impending doom of literature as he notes:

Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

I have no idea who Charles is referring to when he writes about people who "work for a living" (as opposed to working for fun I guess?) or what they actually do but it is entirely possible that perhaps they are lying in their responses to him. They might read novels but don't want to admit the kind of novels they enjoy. They would be wise to be circumspect in this regard as just a few paragraphs later Charles let's us know what he thinks of the current trends in popular reading for adults:

And when their parents do pick up a novel, it's often one that leaves a lot to be desired. True, Oprah Winfrey can turn serious works of fiction such as Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" or Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" into megasellers. But among the top 20 best-selling books on Amazon.com this week, only six are novels -- and that includes the upcoming seventh volume of He Who Must Not Be Outsold, James Patterson's "The Quickie," the 13th volume of Janet Evanovich's comic mystery series and a vampire love saga.

It seems to me that those working people he talks to are looking down on him before he has a chance to look down on them. Who's going to admit to a Post critic that they love Patterson or Evanovich (or King or Roberts or heaven help us - Laurell K. Hamilton?) Harry Potter is the safe literary topic because you have to love Harry (or at least you aren't considered stupid for loving him and you can always blame a child/niece/nephew for even caring). But I shudder to think what Charles would say to you if you admitted having John Grisham on your nightstand.

Yeah - you know he would have something less than kind to say about that sort of reading.

I'm sure that Charles cares about his subject (he does read for a living after all) but I hate it when anyone hinges their argument on the downfall of literature or Harry Potter and uses a study that makes a statement about the entire country based on less than 20,000 responses. How did the NEA choose the 17,000 people it surveyed? And is it fair to ask students in a survey if you've read anything that wasn't required for school and then determine that if they say no they aren't literary readers? Pleasure reading doesn't really happen much when you are in school but the mere fact that you are there seems to suggest you value reading and learning. And as far as asking folks who work full time if they are reading novels in their leisure time - well, many people read less when they are working and their children are small and then pick it up again as their daily schedule lightens up. Anyway, to base such broad generalizations on such a small group (and yes, I think in this case 17,000 is a damn small group) is just silly. And then for Charles to say that somehow all the positive reading that is taking place with Harry Potter doesn't count as good for literature really kills me. Here's how Harry is not good for literary reading:

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures.

So reading a novel doesn't count unless practically no one else is reading it? We can't read a book that everyone else is talking about?

If that's the case then why in the hell is the Ron Charles writing about Harry Potter in the Post at all? Why isn't he telling us about some deserving but relatively unknown book that we should read that might enhance our literary appreciation? (Unless of course by telling us he would be reducing its value as a novel....my head is spinning right now.)

The article ends with Charles saying Potter fans should be reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series - which really confuses me since that was written for kids and earlier he was telling us adults should be reading adult books. Is there no pleasing this man??! He also generally alludes to "...the dozens of other brilliant fantasy authors who could take them places that little Harry never dreamed of..." and specifically mentions a literary novel The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. Apparently that was Charles' favorite book last year. He laments the fact that this historical novel about the Irish Potato Famine has sold less that 4,000 copies. But from Charles' own review I can tell him why I didn't read the book:

Fergus's siblings and parents are finally burned alive in their beds, too weak with hunger even to object. Only Fergus survives, and, in what's considered a great act of charity, he's deposited in a workhouse, where he's immediately stripped, shaved and sprayed with acid to kill the lice.

I get that kind of realism from the nonfiction I read Mr. Charles - which lately is including the overfishing of our oceans, the Iraq War and a group of climbers who died on Denali. For novels I like to find something that won't completely suck the life out of me. If that makes me an unimpressive reader in your eyes then I can live with it. Quite frankly, I don't read for anyone's approval anyway - especially someone who wants to blame Harry Potter for the decline of book reviews in newspapers. Someone needs to tell the NBCC about this so they can transfer their attention to JK Rowling:

All those people carrying around an 800-page novel looks like a great thing for American literacy, but it's as ominous as a Forbidden Forest with only one species of tree. Since Harry Potter first Apparated into our lives a decade ago, the number of stand-alone book sections in major metropolitan newspapers has decreased by half -- silencing critical voices that once helped a wide variety of authors around the country get noticed.

I'll let others explain why that is idiotic and go back to my reading, which currently includes one short story collection for adults, one nonfiction book on Antarctica and two novels for teens. Go ahead - try and judge me for loving all of them equally.