And it shows, believe it or not, in his policy statements.

Read about how serious he is in following Potter stories in the Daily Telegraph story from 2007, Barack Obama Under the Harry Potter Spell. I’m pretty sure this is credible (as opposed to the campaign claim that President Garfield could write in Latin and Greek — simultaneously, using right and left hands for either language…).

Alison Williams, a friend of this blog, wrote at Harry Potter for Seekers (HT to RHT!) that we can see the Dumbledore influence in his comments about possibly closing the prisons at Gitmo:

“Sometimes we have to choose between what is right and what is easy.” – Albus Dumbledore

“We are willing to observe core standards, not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.” – Obama on closing Guantanamo.

President Obama is not a Fabian Socialist a la Dumbledore, it’s fair to assume, but it’s nice to think we can play “spot the Rowling quote” for several years in the new President’s public statements. How many other authors do you think he has read aloud in the past few years? To the tune of 4100 pages? My bet is “not many.”

According to a new NEA study, we all are and it’s due to a rise in how much fiction we all read.

I know I’m reading a lot more fiction today than I was ten years ago and that this change is largely due to our favorite boy wizard and the Hogwarts adventures. Is this true of you, too? How has your reading changed, both in terms of what you are reading and how you read it?

Well, I have a friend there! Patricio Tarantino, the webmaster at RedFlu ~ Noticias de Harry Potter, has written me a few times and yesterday posted a review of Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader at his beautiful and popular site. (Mr. Tarantino’s English is very good but the book review is in Spanish.) For all of you polygluts, please visit the site and let me know what you think.

One of the joys of being a Potter Pundit is correspondence I enjoy with serious readers around the world (hi, Odd!). ‘Tinuvielas’ is a German writer who has written here several times and to me personally about literary alchemy and I have always been enriched, not to say ‘stretched,’ by what I have learned in those notes. I hope very much, for instance, that you will someday be able to read Tiunvielas’ thoughts on the alchemy in Shelley’s Frankenstein which promises to be great work.

Anyway, Tinuvielas posted notes this morning on HogPro alchemy threads and I worry that many readers who don’t scan the “comments” column daily will miss the insights therein. Hence this compilation post. I look forward to reading your comments about and corrections to these thoughts: [Read more…]