Vocabulary work

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 331.

Part I

Harry Potter

Vocabulary extension

Unit 7. LIFE CHANGES

to beat / break / cut / better / surpass a record

to establish / set a (new) record

to hold a record

national record

Olympic record

speed record

unbroken record

world record

Why are children around the world so eager for the next installment of a story about a boy wizard? Maybe it's because they see themselves in him.

ON THE SAME SUMMER DAY THAT 6-year-old Catie Hoch beat her own personal best jumping rope record —100 in a row—the doctors discovered that "the pain in her side was coming from a tumor on her kidney. "In that split second," her mother Gina Peca remembers, "your whole life changes. You're going along safety-proofing your house and trying to feed your kids the right food, thinking you have control over their safety, and you don't."

There was even less control over the course of the next two years as the cancer spread, through seven rounds of chemo, three operations on Catie's lungs and one on her liver. It was during that time that Gina began to read aloud the first three books about a schoolboy wizard named Harry Potter, who knew something about fighting fierce, deadly enemies. Maybe that's why, when they took the train from their home in upstate New York to New York City for treatment, Catie wore a red cape, red lightning-shaped scar on her forehead, a wand and big black glasses. She was ready for anything.

In January 2000, when it seemed as if her treatment options had run out, Catie was back home, her chances of living to read Book 4 looking very slim. That is when an e-mail arrived from someone in Britain who had heard about the 8-year-old girl in New York who loved Harry so much. "I am work­ing very hard on Book 4 at the moment" the author confided_, and she talked about the chapter she was writing, how the werewolf professor Lupin was one of her favorite characters, and about some new creatures who would be making their debut! “This is all TOP SECRET,” she warned, so Catie could tell her family but nobody else, “or you'll be getting an owl from the Ministry of Magic for giving our secrets away to Muggles. It was signed, "With Lots of Love, J.К. Rowling (Jo to anybody in Gryffindor)."

Over the next days and weeks, Catie wrote to her new friend about her birthday party; her friends; her new dog, Potter Gryffindor Hoch (the first name after Harry's surname and the middle one after the dormitory house in which he lives at school). She seemed to be getting stronger, brighter, in her excitement about her new pen pal. Jo wrote back at length, typing from her home in Scotland as the windows rattled in the January gales. “It's a bit spooky”, she wrote one night. “I sleep at the top of the house (like Ron) and when it's stormy like tonight I keep waking up wondering what creaked… you see, I m not as brave as Harry— if you told me there was a gigantic snake wandering around at night where I was living, I'd hide under the bedclothes and let someone else sort it out.” Jo was candid about other things that frightened her. “I don't mind talking to big groups of people your age at all, because you ask interesting questions, but talking to adults scares me.”

Gina watched the friendship unfold, watched a stuffed owl and a toy ginger cat arrive in the mail as gifts. “I couldn't believe it when the first e-mail arrived, but what I really couldn't believe was that they kept it up,” she says. “This wasn't a once or twice I heard a little girl was sick, and I sent a get-well note.” To me it was a relationship. I don't know what Jo was thinking, but she was taking time out of a very, very busy schedule to write precious e-mails to Catie.”

Maybe it was sympathy. But maybe it was admiration. “I admire bravery above almost every other characteristic,” Rowling told TIME a few months later, when she sat down to talk about the characters she had created. “Bravery is a very glamorous virtue, but I'm talking bravery in all sorts of places.” It is, as Rowling attests from the first chapter of the first book, the virtue that cannot be faked: you either walk into the woods full of giant spiders or you don't. Stand up to bullies, or hide from them. Hang on to hope, or surrender to fear. She addresses children as though they know as much as or more than she does about the things that matter. Kids like the characters she has created, Harry above all, not be­cause he is fantastic but because he is fa­miliar. Rowling, they say, gets everything right, writes as though she knows what it is to be 13 years old and anxious or shocked at discovering what you can actually do if you try. Maybe she finds her way straight into the hearts of children because she never left in the first place.

That is at least a place to start in trying to understand why Rowling's books are the most popular children's series ever written. It is hard not to believe in magic when you consider what she has done. Through her books, she speaks to kids in Milan and Morocco and Minnesota, and those con­versations too are somehow private, even though they are conducted in 200 coun­tries, in 55 languages, in Braille[1], in 200 mil­lion volumes. Children buy her books with their own money. They wear out flashlights reading them after lights-out. Kids with a fear of fat books and dyslexic kids who have never finished a book read Harry Potter not once or twice but a dozen times. Parents report reading levels jumping four grades in two years. They cannot quite believe this gift, that for an entire generation of chil­dren, the most powerful entertainment ex­perience of their lives comes not on a screen or a monitor or a disc but on a page.

So many of those children will be tired come Saturday morning, June 21, because on the shortest night of the year, the night when whatever you dream is said to come true, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale at one minute past midnight. On that night there will be Potter parties complete with owls and cloaks, and those who can, will lobby their parents to let them wear their Potter pjs and sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. Some families have ordered two or three books, to prevent civil war. At 8.5 million copies, this is the largest first printing ever: and at close to 900 pages, the longest children's book there is. It already has the top advance sales in history: it was Amazon.com's best seller two hours after it became available for pre-ordering. And its contents were so secret that a forklift driver was sentenced for stealing pages from a printing plant in Britain and trying to sell them to the Sun for £25,000, or $41,000.

Not all the numbers are nice, of course: the American Library Association ranks the Harry Potter books as the most chal­lenged in the country; more parents have requested that Harry be banished from bookshelves than they have Huck Finn, more than Catcher in the Rye. Conser­vative Christian parents have argued that the books promote witchcraft and Satan­ism; a student in Houston had to get up and leave the room every time the teacher read aloud from Harry Potter. But even that ruckus has calmed down or come to stand for a much larger conversation about what should shape the moral life of children. "I think any unusual focus on things like magic and witchcraft is a bad idea," says Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, "but these things can also be a natural part of storytelling with children. So I think the Potter argument is really about bigger and deeper battles going on all over the culture about our national character.”

There is also a small secular culture war about whether these books are good enough to deserve their acclaim, whether they will endure as classics or fade as fads. The charge, which given the mass popularity is typically made rather quietly, is that the stories are formulaic and conventional. The attack came first and most famously from stuffy Yale professor Harold Bloom, keeper of keys to the literary kingdom, who dismissed the first Harry Potter book as thin and derivative in a 2000 article in the Wall Street Journal, and has since refused to at any of the sequels. “I would think in another generation or so,” he told TIME, “Harry Potter will be in the dustbins everywhere. It will be period-piece rubbish because it is so atrociously written.”

He is, to put it mildly, in a minority; Bloom might be surprised at the number of adult readers who scour the texts for Jungian archetypes and trace the folkloric roots of hinkypunks, mischievous creatures who mislead travelers into bogs. “I think she's a terrific writer,” says Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of 80 children's books, who has read the first book. “And she's a ripper-offer like me. She has taken from some of the best English literature and cooked up her own stew. It's brilliant, and I have every intention of reading the others; otherwise, children I know will kill me.”

Teachers who actually encounter children every day are as appreciative. “I don't know that it is literature like “The Grapes of Wrath”, argues Gail Hackett, a librarian at Monroe Elementary in Des Moines, Iowa. But it's not “Captain Underpants” either”. Beyond their gratitude at anything that gets kids to read, parents and teachers appreciate how Rowling doesn't pander or patronize. “Generally adults in children's literature are horrible or incompetent”, observes Debbie Mitchell of the Magic Tree bookstore in Oak Park, Ill, while Rowling shows adults being wise and fair and, in the gamekeeper Hagrid, the best friend imaginable. Her tone can also grow dark and Grimm in ways that many contemporary children's fantasies don't. “Children's psyches are a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit for,” says Susanne Ferleger, a child therapist in Encino, Calif. “Adults would like to think that in kids' minds the world is rosy. But they sugarcoat the deeper feelings of children. Rowling taps into that on so many levels.”

Younger readers sense that she knows their world and their tastes. Kids care about brands: a Nimbus 2000 broom is the best on the market; at least until the Nimbus 2001 broom is released. They like to solve her puzzles; they are tickled to see that Diagon Alley, the wizard mall, is of course laid out diagonally. They like a character who moves from being powerless to being magical, to having powers even over other adults. Harry's being an orphan makes him both more vulnerable and independent in ways most 13-year-olds are not, he had to invent himself because his spirit was not likely to be gently formed by odious aunt and uncle. Not having a regular family, kids say, is something many of them can relate to. Teachers in inner-city schools, where many troubled kids are bouncing through foster care, are stunned by the power of the books over their students. “Many of these kids have grown up without parents, but they still have to make moral choices in their lives," notes Ebony Thomas, 25, an English teacher at Cass Tech High School in Detroit. "Before, those choices might have been dictated by church, by family, by community; now you have to face that alone, and the choice lies within yourself. This is a generation that really needs Harry Potter."

There were already lots of books with unicorns and wizards in them before Harry came along, certainly lots of books about orphans searching for their roots and adolescents coming of age—which leaves the question of what Rowling has done differently. Unlike some buff and brawny superheroes, Harry has the look of a nerd but the heart of a hero. He is small but fast: the wand is mightier than the sword. "He's kind of like me," says Alex Heggen, 12, of Des Moines, who, like so many kids, sees some of himself in Harry and hopes to find more of Harry in himself. "He's just brave sometimes ... I've got black hair, I wear glasses, we're about the same height... Wearing glasses and having braces—getting picked on is just your life. You have to deal with it."