Some fictional characters get their invitation to the perfect school by owl. For you, there’s this e-mail from Kenyon College.

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The Huffington Post yesterday put up a fun, provocative article, Should J. K. Rowling Win the Noble Prize? I urge you to read the whole thing and share your thoughts in the comment boxes below.

Here are three thoughts off the top of my head about this article and the possibility that Ms. Rowling might be honored this way:

(1) Would they be honoring her or she them? Forgive me for stating the obvious but the bloom is long off the rose of winning a Nobel Prize, outside of the so-called ‘hard sciences.’ What prompted this HuffPro piece, for an example beyond President Obama receiving the Peace Prize or Tom Friedman winning the Economics Nobel, was the revelation that C. S. Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Literature Prize and was turned down because Tollers “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.” As the author points out, the criteria for the Literature reward from Oslo seems at least as much political correctness and artistic obscurity as literary merit. If Ms. Rowling accepted the prize, it’s value in the eyes of the great unwashed reading public would skyrocket; they would know and have read at least one writer who was a Nobel Laureate.

(2) Does the Hogwarts Saga meet the Literature Prize’s criteria? Here is where it gets to be fun. Forget the actual criteria used by judges in Norway alluded to above. Do Harry’s adventures satisfy the standards that Alfred Nobel set down so long ago?

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2011 was a wild ride, wasn’t it? Harry Potter fandom experienced the  ‘end of the beginning’ when the last movie adapted from the Hogwarts Saga was released [for a longish explanation why this is an ‘end of the beginning’ rather than a ‘beginning of the end,’ read Harry Is Here to Stay]. The Hunger Games entered into an ever larger audience of readers, setting records for sales on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader and receiving daily news updates from film sites in North Carolina. Twilight lovers, too, had a banner year with the wedding album and Renesmee birthing in Breaking Dawn, Part 1.

And we discussed it all here on HogwartsProfessor.com! Our faculty took shape this year with the official appointments of Elizabeth Baird Hardy, John Patrick Pazdziora, Louise Freeman, and M.Brett Kendall as full professors, James of TwilightNewsSite.com as an adjunct prof, and a gaggle of Guest posters with special insights about Harry, Katniss, Bella, and great reading in general.

The year ended with a MuggleNet.com feature interview with me about Ring Composition (you can listen to or read the transcript here). This sort of linkage always brings with it a relative flood of new visitors to HogwartsProfessor.com — ‘HogPro’ among friends — so, as welcome and means of introduction to what we do here, I’ve collected links after the jump for something like a ‘HogPro Greatest Hits of 2011’ page with links to outside sites and our vaults as well.

Welcome, newcomers, to the conversations about the 21st Century’s most popular and arguably its best reading and writing! Thank you, All-Pros, for a delightful year gone by — and Happy New Year!

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