I've never read a Harry Potter book, nor seen any of the movies. This isn't a principled stand. By the time I realized I should probably catch up, there were so damn many of them that starting from the beginning seemed a daunting task -- so I haven't, even though I feel like I'm missing out on a particularly cool cultural experience. The upside of this, though, is that I've not been terribly involved in the hype over the coming book, nor the arguments with elitist critics bashing its worth:
According to Amazon, the best-selling book of 2006 was "Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems," by Cesar Millan. My favorite was "The Law of Dreams," a first novel by a 56-year-old writer named Peter Behrens. It's the story of an orphaned boy who doesn't know why he survived the evil force that killed his parents -- and left him scarred. Set during the Irish potato famine of 1847, it's not a fantasy, and it's not for children, but there are plenty of monsters here, and Behrens writes in a style that's pure magic. As of this writing, it has sold 8,367 copies in the United States. It's enough to make a book critic snap his broom in two.
As a general point, I side with the hoi polloi in these disputes. Particularly when the substance is that not enough people listen to your awesome indie band, or read your unknown book about being orphaned during the Irish Potato Famine.
But an e-mail from Politics and Prose, the best bookstore in DC, and one that caters to both families and the sort of people who write critical reviews for newspapers, struck me as having a pretty solomonic solution to this particular dispute. In an e-mail entitled "Harry Potter Night," the Politics and Prose people use an e-mail advertising their Potter release parties to also say:
We told Ron Charles that we read his review of The Law of Dreams and then we read the book, which we loved. We have sold 70 copies and know that we will sell several hundred more when it comes out in paperback in September. We all have to plug away at letting people know about books that we love. That's why we've started an online book review, “So Many Books, So Little Time,” which we launched in May. That's why we put out a Summer Newsletter full of choices in paperback.
THE LAW OF DREAMS ($24.95) will be offered at 20% off this week.
See? Everyone's happy.
