When I was a kid in elementary school, I used to get in trouble for reading. It seems absurd. But when I was ten, I could read with utter concentration. I could remain immersed in Bullfinch’s Mythology when the television was on and not know that Samantha was twinkling her nose at people. If Alex and the Black Stallion had been separated and Alex had lost his memory, I never knew my mother was calling for me. After I raced through whatever work we were doing in class and opened At the Back of the North Wind, I was oblivious to the teacher calling our attention and starting the next lesson. So Mr. Fish, my fourth grade teacher, used to take my library book from me and put it on the chalk rail of the blackboard, close to the door. I could pick it up at the end of the day. Once my book had been confiscated, I was forced to fall back on drawing horses, which probably says way too much about what kind of girl I was.

I don’t read with the same fervor anymore. When I was a kid I didn’t care if it was fine literature or trash, just as long as the words marched orderly along the page. I didn’t know what a rotten social agenda lay behind At the Back of the North Wind. Now I don’t like some things and love others and I notice the dog scratching at the back door, no matter how good the book is. But I still hide in books–at the doctor’s office, in airports, even sometimes in bank lines.

I reading for a couple of months after September 11. If a story evoked real, strong feeling in me, I felt an emotional exhaustion, a kind of hangover. So I avoided the things I was reading and more and more I look at books that I was planning to read, like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which begins with an unsuccessful suicide, and I just didn’t want to go there. I was afraid it would make me feel complicated things.

I’m ill-equipped for the world on its own terms. I mean, if I’m not reading, I have to do things. Like clean my house and balance my checkbook. I watched a lot of television after September 11, most of it really pointless stuff on cable like the show where two couples each have 48 hours and $1,000 to redecorate a room in their friend’s house with the advice of a decorator. Fireplaces got painted purple and people wound up with lots of leopard print throw pillows. (My family called it Decorating for Sadists.) But television isn’t as convenient as a book and somehow, with commercials, it isn’t as all-encompassing, as comforting.

Then I thought of the perfect thing to read so I went to the library and checked out what was then all four of the Harry Potter books. I’m not a big reader of children’s literature. The emotional strokes are broad, the colors are bright. But right then there was something comforting about Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azbakan. For six days I read them during my office hours at school, before I went to bed at night and during lunch. Remember the Flintstones, where technology was replaced by weird, stone age style contraptions? Where a tiny little bird had it’s beak stuck on a stone record to play music? Harry Potter is full of the magical equivalents of that: tents for camping that look small and normal on the outside but are as big as bungalows and fully furnished on the inside, or mail delivered by owls or mirrors that show your heart’s desire. It’s a vivid escape from reality, a place where I knew Harry was going to be all right–there were three more books coming in the series, so he had to be all right.

I remember a professor saying that during the Blitz in London, people read Anthony Trollope’s novels. I don’t know if it’s true or if it is some sort of English Department Urban Myth, but somehow I can see how Trollope’s six volumes of Barsetshire novels–stories about family and the everyday moral victories and failures of life–could provide a sense of continuity in a world seemingly gone mad. In fact, I plan to take a look at them myself now that Harry Potter is going to come to an end.

I don’t think that Harry dies in the end of the seventh book. I’ll find out in the 21^st, even though I won’t be at a bookstore at midnight because I’m sure it will be all over the net, even if I try to avoid it. But I think that J.K. Rowling is a pretty good writer. I think the books are pretty good books. I love them, and I’m grateful for them, and a little sad (although I think it’s utterly the right thing to do) that they are almost done.

At least I like the movies, too. And there will be a couple more years of those.