Reading is dead. Long live reading!

Once upon a time, in a galaxy very much like ours, there lived a boy. More than anything else, this boy was a dreamer. He dreamed of many things, but mostly he just liked magic. Many a day found him curled up in the almost amniotic warmth of his own imagination, wistfully braving quests of incalculable magnitude in endless daydream. It might not surprise the reader to learn this boy was a great fan of books.

At first, there was no stopping the boy. His appetite for the greatest fantasy was boundless. More than once he found himself carelessly adding each unknown tome on the shelf beneath the fantasy sign to his basket, pausing only momentarily to consider that he had not, in fact, already read that one. Life was very exciting for the boy! He craved the creativity and power each story held, and relished in adding bits of each one to his own imaginative wonderland.

But that ceased as the boy found other hobbies. Games, in particular, enthralled the boy. Games of fantasy. Games that let the boy be a part of the very things he read! The boy allowed his interest in the books to die, in part because the boy found it hard to justify time spent in books versus time spent in games. The games, after all, continued to live and flourish in endless fantasy. The books ended. There was always a pang of regret when the books ended. It was hard for the boy, and he chose the games.

At least, that's what I thought at the time.

There was more to it than that. Fantasy was dead. Who gave a shit about magic? There were adolescent things to worry about. Never mind none of us were really adolescents. But we believed we were, and we believed the problems teenagers faced in sitcoms were our problems.

Oh, I clung to the old ways a little. One moment in particular, I think, put the entire tragic tale in context. Call it my coming of age story, or at least the story where the protagonist would be expected to come of age then and there or risk losing the audience. We had an assignment in class to watch a television show we were familiar with, with the stipulation that we must watch this show without sound. Another, a family member perhaps, would watch the same show unfettered, and after conferring you would know what you had missed. I cannot quite place the meaning of this assignment just now, though I can imagine it had something to do with compassion for those with disabilities, but that is irrelevant to the thrust of this tale. When our results were presented to the class, I discovered to my dismay every other person had chosen some serial vehicle of teenage angst and waxing sexual frustration. I had chosen Tiny Toons.

The games, though I still played them some, lost their fury and splendor shortly after. I had been reading seldom by this time as it was, and now I completely relinquished the long hours spent living vicariously through my heroes indefinitely. Though magic was there, it was lifeless. The world had turned away and grown up.

Several long years went by. Sure, I was happy. Indeed! Please make no claim to emo, angsty, or any condition but bliss in this tale! I may have missed my magic from time to time, but it was a happy memory. An excitement the boy had known and loved in distant times past.

Then...she came.

She wrote a story. A children's story. About a boy. It was a fantasy story, to be sure. There was magic in this story. I was leery. Once I would have taken any excuse to read the tale about the Boy Who Lived, but not now. Fantasy had abandoned me, I felt, and I was not about to rejoin my long lost love in this...this fairy tale. I had loved her, and she had gone. Let the happy memory remain! I was taken aback at first by the enthusiasm with which the book was met, but confident that in time it would abate and things would be as they always were.

And little by little, it began. The groundswell. The movement. It did not abate but pressed on slowly, like a tiny leak in a dam. It wasn't just Harry Potter now, now they were remaking the Lord of the Rings! I was outraged. How dare they soil my love with personal gain! Fantasy was a fad and they were wringing it for all it was worth. I felt haughty. People were just discovering the magic and I, I had been there from the beginning. I had loved it and it was MINE. I refused on principle to read this "Harry Potter," though there was little danger of that. I had not read in years, after all.

The dam began to crack more noticeably now. I ignored it. The books were tantalising, to be sure. I started to envy the readers and their discoveries. "Why, just this week I finished a book you've never heard of," they would say. And their eyes would be so filled with the distant wonder that accompanies the genre that I would have to look away.

And then the dam broke, the people and their excitement poured forth, and in the ensuing flood the house I had built was destroyed.

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So here we are, nearly seven years later, and Harry Potter is officially fucking amazing. I hadn't been this excited for ANYTHING in so long, I didn't know what to do with myself before the book was released. Read them all over again? Done and done. Chatter with friends about the newest theories? Of course. I listened to Harry Potter podcasts for fuck's sake! And it hasn't ended there, of course. I have just finished the stunning His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and I can't wait to read them again. The Boy Who Lived turned out to be a gateway drug, a vehicle for the socially-enabled web generation to take their love of knowing what the hell everyone else was doing all the time and use their powers to create a meme so powerful and absurdly pervasive it slapped the face of all the English bigwigs that had declared the language and its aging tomes dead, among whose number I counted myself until very recently.

And it is here that I make my impassioned plea:

Friends, don't let this happen again. Harry Potter is over. The ship is sailed and now we're all standing on the shore trying to figure out whether to swim or travel deeper inland. When next we read, tell everyone. Let it be known. Make it public; scream it from the roofs and hilltops. Just because the books are alive and well now does not mean they are not still in mortal danger! More than that, we cannot let the fiction die. Without it, that child in all of us is lost.

I'll start. Read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's fucking brilliant.