I was unaware that Pope Benedict XVI opposed the Harry Potter books.
Now I know.
He hasn’t. The headline is not true, the Cardinal wrote some private correspondence. Not the pope.
Seeking air conditioning yesterday I went into one of the two bookstores in town and got chatting with a clerk.
This bookstore – not counting pre-sales – is bringing in about 600 copies of the next installment – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That’s amazing for an area this size and this series is a huge money maker.
Not being a parent, I’m not going to get into the kerfuffle about Harry Potter.
My nephew and I have had great discussions about the series, including why some parents don’t allow their kids to read it and why some of his friends aren’t interested in reading much of anything.
When I was a kid, my parents did not censor my reading. I remain extremely grateful to them for that decision. At 7 or 8 I buried myself in Swedish fairy tales, by 12 I was reading about real life horrors such as WWII. I think if my parents had said I wasn’t permitted to read something, I’d have gone right ahead and read it to find out why.
I’ll never understand why people have such issues with children being dipped into an amazing world of imagination. It’s a crime these days, for children to use their imaginations. If they do, they get labelled ADD and put on medication. It’s a shame, that parents aren’t more aware and active in their childrens lives. Our kids have read the harry potter books, they’ve seen the movies, and we all love them as a family. That’s the stuff dreams are made of. (Not sleep dreams, but daydreams.) They’re just fiction books, they aren’t real, and really, what’s the fuss? We as adults read fictional science fiction stuff all the time, why shouldn’t our children too?