I have recently started reading the first Harry Potter book to my eldest child, and, as I've never read a single word of the series before,* I am in a sense reading it to myself as well. I thought I would share some observations.
The first is banal, but as Milan Kundera reminded us, it is often the most banal observations that shock us the most. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released in 1997. This still somehow feels recent to me (I was 16 at the time), but, of course, it isn't at all - 1997 is as distant to us as 1971 was distant to it. An awful lot changed between 1971 and 1997, and an awful lot has changed afterwards. There were no mobile phones to speak of in 1997; no internet really; no hipsters (except possibly in Seattle). It was still an analogue, print world - one in which, indeed, it was possible for a series of books for children to sell hundreds of millions of copies around the world (a thing now truly inconceivable). It was the world of Friends, of Starbucks, of cheap and easy international travel, of optimism, of Brit Pop. That world has gone, and it is genuinely difficult now to conjure its texture in the mind, let alone communicate it to children. Without wishing to sound too maudlin, I am nearly as old now as my dad was in 1997. Shit - I need to start writing that great English novel, learn Ancient Greek, visit Tasmania and make a bucket list.
The second is only a little less banal: it's now possible for a child to sit down and watch all the Harry Potter films, back-to-back, instantly, and essentially at no cost, in the comfort of their own bedroom. I of course will not let my own children do this, because I am an ogre and only let them watch 30 minutes of TV a day, and because after the second one the films get too scary for a 6 year old. But there is nothing stopping it in practice. Our children do not really have an experience of scarcity of entertainment in the way we did, unless it is forced upon them by their parents. A lot of parents don't enforce any such scarcity (just look at how many quite happily let their toddlers zone out in front of an iPad while at a restaurant or out in the pram), and we are as a result going to see something of a social experiment unfold as the current generation ages: some kids will be brought up in something like a traditional way; others will be brought up without even a concept of how to process boredom. Something to think about.
The third concerns JK Rowling's own implicit views. No, I'm not opening the trans can of worms: I mean about class. I glean from her wikipedia entry that I am not the first person to observe this, but there is something really in-your-face snobby about the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and to which I had quite a visceral reaction. JK Rowling is a sensitive, bookish, creative middle-class girl, and she wears her prejudices on her sleeve. For her, the bumptious, upwardly-mobile, suburban, lower middle-class Dursleys (the father of whom owns a factory that makes drills - ugh! They're trade!) are beneath contempt, made worse because they don't appreciate the things that nice people like she does - things like books, and reading, and, er, books, and reading. This snootiness is not appealing; it's something Roald Dahl could also be guilty of, but the saving grace of Dahl was that he was a genuine misanthrope whose hatred was scattergun. JK Rowling's feels focused on a particular type of English family - privet hedge, car in driveway, bacon for breakfast, smallish mock-tudor detached house in suburban estate - which it is easy to mock and belittle, but without whom society simply could not function.
The fourth concerns the writing. JK Rowling is not Proust. Nor is she Roald Dahl, a writer she obviously copies, both stylistically and thematically (the plot of Harry Potter is essentially The Lord of the Rings meets Matilda, and the opening paragraph of The Philosopher's Stone is pure, undistilled Dahl, but Rowling doesn't have the twisted turns of phrase that he had or the comic timing**). I can't say I quite understand how the book ever captivated adult fans. But, for what it is, it is readable, well-paced, competent - better, much better, than I was expecting. (Far better, for instance, than the truly execrable Twilight books, which in my head was the closest comparator.)
The fifth concerns the films. I have seen each of the films, though only once; they're okay - mostly within the solid, three-star range. But what is immediately noticeable (again, a banal observation) is how their content merely skates over the surface of the book. One of the things that I disliked about the later films was that the plots lost coherence (something about horcruxes and elder wands and Helena Bonham Carter), and one got the strong sense that the filmmakers were simply relying on audiences basically knowing the stories already and being easily distracted by nice special effects and classically-trained English actors being very serious and important. This suggest that, when one reads the books, the plot is actually coherent, and serves to remind me of the important maxim that films of books are the absolute pits.
The sixth and final concerns my eldest. Disappointingly, she loves it. I think I'm in for the long haul.
*I was 16 when the first book came out, which was exactly the wrong age: too old to appreciate a kids' book, but too young to have an adult perspective on a kids' book. I was also (and still am, really) one of those genre snobs who hates mainstream, crossover successes.
**An example of Dahl's brilliance:
'In a way, the medicine had done Grandma good. It had not made her any less grumpy or bad-tempered, but it seemed to have cured all her aches and pains, and she was suddenly as frisky as a ferret. As soon as the crane had lowered her to the ground, she ran over to George's huge pony, Jack Frost, and jumped onto his back. This ancient old hag, who was now as tall as a house, then galloped around the farm on the gigantic pony, jumping over trees and sheds and shouting:
"Out of my way! Clear the decks! Stand back, all you miserable midgets or I'll trample you to death!" and other silly things like that.
But because Grandma was much too tall to get back into the house, she had to sleep that night in the hay-barn with the mice and the rats.'
I'm sorry to inform that the last few books are even less coherent than their film adaptations.
ReplyDeleteYes - I actually think the films did their best with terrible material when it comes to the last 2-3 books.
DeleteDisagree - as a young book fan, I was always baffled that anyone could follow the latter films at all given how much they left out. Not to mention the odd feuding between directors that leaves each film feeling like a slightly different continuity.
DeleteInteresting spectrum of views - I'll report back if and when I get that far...
DeleteThe later films to me felt more like a kind of ambient mood than a story: a hodgepodge of cliches held together by good acting (Daniel Radcliffe excepted) and music and some exciting and emotional set pieces. I sort of got the gist of it through osmosis and through already knowing the source material from which it steals.
I really liked book 5 - my favourite of the series, mostly liked book 6, and thought book 7 was a mess. I think the plotting started to fall apart at the end of book 6. I'm going to blame Twitter for that. I believe J. K. Rowling is the sort of person who gets addicted to being opinionated on social media, and her writing suffered as a result.
DeleteThe more expensive illustrated books have nice pictures IMO.
Rowling's favourite book is Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford, an upper class Communist.
I look forward to more of your insights into class as you get deeper in the series. As an American what stood out to me is that Harry is the fantasy of being a winner. I grew up on John Bellaires books where magic is a consolation for being a fat kid without friends or parents. For Harry, magic is the ticket to becoming a star athlete and the most talked-about student at an elite school. In my experience Harry Potter was like M:tG for how quickly it increased the number of, and decreased the mean grottiness of, fantasy readers or gamers.
ReplyDeleteSee my comment to Ruprecht below. It's like Harry is an upper-middle class cuckoo in a lower-middle class nest - a fate worse than death. A lot of British society and culture can be understood through this lens: upper-middle class people preventing lower-middle class people from having the nice things that they've got.
DeleteThe true upper classes (the blue bloods) don't care about class war and the working classes have no cultural cache. The big clash is between the upstart strivers and the bourgeois types who want to pull the drawbridge up behind them.
Also, it might be that being clever is a way to get status in a British school, or at least compatible with status, in a way it's not in the more anti-intellectual environment of an American school - I can attest that everything you've seen about nerds, football quarterbacks, and cheerleaders is true!
DeleteI'm no expert on the english school system, but most I've read about english boarding schools has indicated "Games" is also the highest good there. C.S. Lewis wrote about his experience in his autobiography, and its, to be honest, kinda horrific.
DeleteBelieve me, being clever is most certainly *not* a way to get status in a British school. It is a way to get bullied and ostracised, just like I imagine it is in the US.
DeleteGetting status in a British school means being good at football and/or being 'cool' in some other way, or rugby or rowing if at a posh school.
"The big clash is between the upstart strivers and the bourgeois types who want to pull the drawbridge up behind them."
DeleteWeird and interesting to read this (almost as weird as the hour I'm writing, the self-employed man's insomnia, what can you do), I'm not saying you're wrong in any way, but my feeling/experience/sense/whatever has always been that the upper middle class *are* the horrible strivers, people who *want* to be properly upper class and send their children to public school and so on but know on some level that it can't happen, no matter what, and so seethe with insane levels of resentment poor people don't even know how to access.
(Hermione in my mind is the avatar of this in the Potter series, whereas Harry is the fantasy of waking up and learning you were really U the whole time. Bank account crammed full of gold, personal access to and disproportionate interest from the figures of authority, critical player of the posh sport, future in the upper echelons of government pretty much automatic assuming you even want it and regardless of academic achievement &c. &c., it's obviously all a bit cack-handed since it's written as a middle-class person's fantasy of being upper-class rather than anything informed by genuine familiarity, but that's how it reads to me, that owl letter would be addressed to The Most Hon. H. Potter, The Marquess of Something if that made sense in the setting.)
I'm curious of your thoughts on Weasley family. To my American eyes the details seemed very positive towards the Weasleys. They are Wizards but also lower class or at least lower middle class.
ReplyDeleteComplicated. They're poor but in a cool, hippy, sensitive, generous sort of a way - the good kind of poor people, in other words, who don't care about money or improving their social standing.
DeletePoor or poorish people who want more money and to climb the social ladder (like the Dursleys) are the bad kind of poor person.
This is British class dynamics 101.
Don't they have a few markers to position them a little higher? The big rambling country house, sons who fit quite nicely into civil service jobs like the paterfamilias, assorted eccentricities (the Black Sheep is a pompous stickler) - one could arguably position them as middling-sort Bohemians.
DeleteYeah, I would say the Weasleys are middle-middle class but without much money - probably due to having so many children! They remind me of my own family (Dad was an art teacher, Mum was an artist, 6 children, big house in a village).
DeleteThey're not quite the sort of family that would rather spend money on their horses and the Aga rather than iPhones and a trip to Tuscany, but they're not so far off.
DeleteDoes "shabby genteel" fit? Maybe their muggle blood maps to some horizontal peculiarity they exhibit within the class system, like being Welsh or Methodist.
DeleteAll good points.
Delete"Maybe their muggle blood maps to some horizontal peculiarity they exhibit within the class system, like being Welsh or Methodist."
DeleteThey're very obviously Irish. I read them as Irish gentry, a stereotypically impoverished type with massive (Catholic) families, though you could make an argument for them just being regular poor Irish, many of the same stereotypes apply.
Yes - I rather think the films did their best with some truly dreadful material.
ReplyDelete"1997 is as distant to us as 1971 was distant to it." Eek.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there are awkward class issues in Harry Potter. Harry finds out he's special, he's different from his boring and boorish family, and more than that he finds out his parents were rich and left him a whole bank vault full of gold coins. Even among the other special people he is special by virtue of his wealth and his fame. I suspect Rowling thought she was just writing typical childhood "Nobody appreciates or respects me like I deserve" wish fulfillment, but ended up unconsciously writing something quite snobby.
I will give JK Rowling credit for very engaging world building (Hogwarts feels like a place you wish you could actually visit) and the ability to write a solid page turner. (Much like Dan Brown, a much-maligned contemporary of Rowling.)
Yes, that was my feeling.
DeleteI had moved to Bangkok from Laos in 1997 as an English teacher (22-23yo), and in 1998 my girlfriend (now wife) had an old brick mobile phone and I had dial-up internet on a Compaq 6GB desktop (that took 6 months to save up for), and would search the net for Necromunda house rules (ran a PBEM campaign with mates back home in Oz) and Fighting Fantasy gamebook mailing lists. We shared an old 70s style apartment with a lawyer and a teacher (who was replaced by a lawyer), and I'd sit downstairs by the pool, with a beer and a special cigarette, at about 4:30pm after finishing work at an international kindergarten teaching expat kids, and read this book, among many others. Enjoyed the whole series, but haven't re-read them. I played bass in a covers band from Thursday to Saturday at night, did some random scribbling that could be called art or words, but was weirdly, indescribably happy, despite our relative poverty compared to genuine expats, and that sense of freedom and happiness has gradually been whittled away down to nothing ever since, never to be convincingly recaptured. The Asian economies had tanked and everyone seemed to be fleeing back home. The late late 90s in South-East Asia were an interesting time...
ReplyDeletePart of this is being young - I have similar memories of being an expat in Japan circa 2003-2005. But part of it is that life was actually better - more sociable, more free, less politicised.
DeleteTrue-ish, but locally, in some ways Bangkok is better now, being older, wiser, and having more spending power, plus the legalization of the green plant has curbed the worst extortionist excesses of the local constabulary, however, there's still this sense of background unease and malaise. Thought-provoking post, will have to reread the books again (I can remember I thought the fifth book needed a harsh hatchet-edit), and watch the DVDs.
DeleteMy daughter, who was born in 2004, first read the series in late 2014. I followed her through the series, reading chapters immediately after she finished them, which enabled us to richly discuss the books. I was pleasantly surprised with the series. It has depths and a Christian sensibility that I did not expect, and the books were never boring (the only unforgivable sin of books). The overall theme of the series is death, resolved in a Christian manner.
ReplyDeleteI hope you will find yourself treasuring your Harry Potter reads with your eldest child.
Thanks, Geoffrey.
DeleteI read the books shortly after my younger brother got into them, and found the first two a breezy, fun read. They are not the best thing in the world, but they felt fresh and competent. As it tends to happen, the later books increasingly get lost in exploring the series canon/mythology, and become progressively less lean. Rowling probably had three good books in her, but ended up writing seven of them.
ReplyDeleteThis could well be right but I will reserve judgment if and when the rest of them get read. Only just got into Chapter Three of the first volume....
DeleteIn re childhood and scarcity, I had a very similar conversation with a colleague. When we were bairns, music, tv, toys etc were scarce. You had a some physical toys and played with them, then later had some films on VHS and DVD you watched, CDs you listened to etc. Kids today have little sense of that scarcity. Does that matter? What is scarce for kids today?
ReplyDeleteLess scarcity seems, at the least, a positive byproduct of progress. It would be weird if a "better" society involved less access to stuff. But kids today enjoy a baseline abundance of stuff that is entirely novel. What does that mean for their development? It's defo a thing we think about with our own kids, but I'm wary of simply trying to emulate a nostalgic version of my own childhood.
I increasingly think of entertainment as being something similar to sugar and salt. We evolved in an entertainment scarce environment, as we evolved in a sugar and salt scarce environment. Given access to lots of it, we consume more than is good for us.
DeleteI read a book earlier this year called British Summer Time Begins, about how children spent their time during the summer holidays in the decades from 1930 to 1979 - before computer games, TVs in bedrooms, Walkmans or video recorders. Scarcity is a big theme. One of the points the book makes is that having an abundance of free time and nothing much to do gave children the opportunity to become an expert in whatever they were interested in (probably something essentially useless like Subbuteo). I expect paper and pencil RPGs with an old-school DIY ethos would have become a bigger part of our culture if they had been invented in, say, 1960.
DeleteThe sugar/salt comparison is apt, but it's less obvious that we've actually passed some kind of healthy entertainment threshold. I'm not even sure how you'd measure that. On @akiyama's point, kids today have many more resources to actually become experts in whatever they are interested in. Yes, it's possible to watch hrs of pointless Youtube every day, but "pointless" Youtube and "learning music/film/fashion/game dev/design etc" Youtube probably look the same to an ignorant adult.
DeleteThe class commentary is fascinating, because as an American so much of that background is just invisible to me. I feel like we in the US often vastly underestimate just how important class has been in British society (doubly so when we instead port our obsession with "race" aka skin color back onto them).
ReplyDeleteI feel like I've read/heard that a lot of this is also bound up in the "boarding school adventure" genre Rowling is drawing on.
Extremely important. We've now ported in American concerns about race as though it's a proxy for class, but it really isn't - and this I think actually suits those who benefit from the class system, because it means we've stopped talking about it.
DeleteOne of my biggest complaints about modern Britain (perhaps the anglosphere in general, maybe even "western" cultures in general) is how media exposure has seemingly convinced people that we are America, that American concerns and foibles are relevant here (whether they are even relevant to America as a whole -- or to any of it -- is another matter, of course). It's not even an active assumption, merely osmosis, but it's one more significant barrier to addressing genuinely relevant concerns. The danger of a common language, I suppose; the "bleed" is far more pronounced.
DeleteWe have the same problems in Canada, where people transpose the racial problems from the country to the south back home, ignoring a lot of historical context. For example, and this is irrelevant to how one may feel about the French province of Québec, a lot of people there both anglophone and francophone transpose a lot of American-ism to modern culture.
DeleteHowever, if one goes back to the 1960s and before, one would find a very sizeable portion of people who are now considered 'white' to have once been very poor, ill educated second class citizen. Mainly the francophones but to a lesser extent groups like the Irish. However because a lot changed economically changed since the '60s, you see people especially young kids scream about 'white privilege' while ignoring that you go back a mere 2-3 generations and its all dirt farmers and factory workers unless you got an English name and your family was upper middle class and above with ties to the British. Even worse, people speaking of shit like reparation for slavery. Except most blacks in that province are from Haiti and came to Québec much later. None of their neighbors, be it they English or French, owned their ancestors. You'd have to go back to the 1700s or before to find a common ancestor between the average white trash and the ancestor of someone's owners, back when their ancestors were British or French.
American SFF has many equivalents to Potter snobbery, but it's not class but aspiration. Both McCaffrey's Harper Hall of Pern and Lackey's Arrows Trilogy, for instance, involve talented girls oppressed by idiotic rural families whose brilliance is only recognized through escape. Weird how our heroines don't feel called to raise food and families.
DeleteGo Team Ogre!
ReplyDeleteI read the first book, and thought it was a nice children's book. I tried to read the next couple but didn't get into them. In a strange twist, back in the day, our oldest son bore a stunning resemblance to the young wizard, and the attention that drew to him led him to read the series. My other sons joined in and had many discussions about the books. They firmly believe that it was during the writing of Goblet of Fire that she began shifting, in light of the rise of Pottermania. My second son's appraisal, once it was all said and done, was that Rowling had created a vast magical universe that her own talents weren't able to fill.
ReplyDeleteSort of in the vein of that last assessment, I think people underestimate the amount of difference that a more aggressive editor likely made in making the first three books better. After those, Pottermania had fully launched, and I often describe the book lengthening as gaining immunity to editors. (She isn't the only one that this happens with; it seems to be a thing that happens to a lot of successful series.)
DeleteYes, there's a certain gentleman in New Mexico who this is very much true of.
DeleteIt's actually easy to see how that could captivate "adult" readers - we just need to remember that people do like to be able to be snobs. I'm myself guilty of that, of course, but I was lucky enough to get better education and was well-read enough before seeing that product. ;))
ReplyDeleteSo, one of the main reasons is exactly the offer to associate with Ze Choozen Un and look down on Those Little and Banal Common People. You recalling hipsters was spot-on - they appeared at almost exactly the same time. ;)
Mike
If you're looking for another series, in which children are sent to a magic school, may I recommend the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones, featuring on Christopher Change. Nominative determinism for the win.
ReplyDeleteThere's also 'The Worst Witch', which my eldest really liked.
DeleteWynne Jones, a woman who annoyed Tolkien by showing up to his lectures, who as a child got chucked out of Beatrix Potter's garden ("she hated children", according to DWJ herself), played in a completely different league than Rowling. I think Rowling would even admit that herself. But there's something about being too good that makes the Rowling sort of popularity impossible. That Galenic and simpering house division is absolutely key to the Potter series' enduring popularity, and I don't think a better writer could have written that sort of trash. (Imagine Ursula LeGuin finding that in her manuscript for A Wizard of Earthsea, and *not* shuddering in disgust, throwing it away, and wondering what had possessed her the day before. An impossible scene.) Twilight's flaws as literature are similarly critical to its appeal as wish fulfillment.
DeleteEven Howl only became a popular figure when Miyazaki used his visual magic on him, turning him from a Welsh ne'er-do-well into a much less complex prettyboy.
Yes, the house thing is so utterly ridiculous. But it does seem to speak to something important about human beings - we kind of like those classification (see e.g. the success of the D&D class/race systems, the oWoD's different 'tribes' and whatnot, etc.).
DeleteWhat's to admire on proles who really don't read? The world's current predicament stems in large part from the sheer stupidity and self-entitlement of the masses. Not only are they proud of their stupidity, they want to enforce it on all the world, and the world complies, for commercial reasons. I actually figured this out without Ortega. (Before anyone starts whining, I'm not a classist, racist or any -ist, I despise almost everyone equally.)
ReplyDeleteOne could say with at least equal validity that the world's problems often stem from those who do read. The scholarly and the intelligent are no more likely to demonstrate wisdom and large-scale awareness than anyone else. Moreover, they often operate within social frameworks that reward a dangerous combination of conformity and competitive maneuvering, and -- perhaps most importantly -- are the ones who come up with ideologies and political movements, and have far more impact and power than "the masses". All the tired "classics" -- fascism, communism, jihadism -- are primarily the product of learned professionals, universities, doctors, and the "educated class"; and it's certainly such people who provide the cultural and media powerbase for the families and organizations that profit from inflicting dysfunction on the world.
DeleteIn honour of this post being about a children's book, one of the passages in a book I read as a child that stuck with me, to the point I can reproduce it here from memory -- from the Animorphs series: "You have more respect for the vicious Yeerks and the cowardly Arn than the Hork-Bajir who fight and die at your side. All that matters to you Andalites is intelligence. Well I've seen enough of Andalite and Yeerk and Arn intelligence to last me a lifetime. Be quiet, Aldrea, it is my people who will die today. Be silent, Andalite. Be silent."
Oh, man. (I'm assuming @Deranged's comment isn't pure trolling.) The idea that intelligence is somehow inherently dangerous, or that there's an equally valid, parallel "common sense wisdom" that salt of the earth folk have, is pernicious nonsense. This quote "The scholarly and the intelligent are no more likely to demonstrate wisdom and large-scale awareness than anyone else." is particular insanity. Wisdom and large-scale awareness REQUIRE intelligence. This isn't a class thing; anyone, whatever their background can be intelligent. Yes, if you're born riding a silver spoon, it's easier to get a fancy degree, but at no stage has the idiot lordling become intelligent just 'cause they have book learning. Everyone operates "within social frameworks that reward a dangerous combination of conformity and competitive maneuvering". Everyone. From the dumbest, brick-brained carpet licker to Bach, Curie and von Neumann. Charisma is another tool to use to "beat" this system, but intelligence is the only tool we have to change it for the better. JFC!
DeleteI'm afraid to say I at least partly agree with Deranged Nasat. Scholarly and intelligent people tend just to be very good at coming up with reasons and adducing evidence for positions from which they benefit. It's not that well-educated, intelligent people are better at getting at the 'right' answer; it's that they start with a (usually self-serving) view and then assiduously and intelligently come up with reasons why it is the right one.
DeleteI agree that there are ways to escape this using intelligence and education (that should be one of its benefits) but in practice this doesn't really happen.
"coming up with reasons and adducing evidence for positions from which they benefit" - everyone does this. I think intelligence and confidence are being conflated. The compulsion to convince yourself and others that you are right is a human thing, not an intelligence thing. Intelligence gives you greater access to ten dollar words and tighter reasoning, but the underlying compulsion to persuade powered by confidence (and bias), not smarts.
DeleteYes, there's often a correlation between the greater intelligence and greater confidence; it makes sense that the more often a person is proved right (because intelligence) the more confident they are they'll be right next time - which can lead them into error. But we all know people whose confidence level is far greater than their ability.
Unwarranted, bias-fuelled confidence is the bane of humanity, not intelligence. (he says, supremely confident)
Nowhere did I say intelligence was inherently dangerous. I'm saying, to greatly simplify the point, that the perception of intelligent people as superior or as less potentially harmful due to that intelligence has no basis in reality. It's telling that my objection to a stratification mired in contempt for the "wrong" group is immediately interpreted as the same thing just with poles reversed. There's also no need to fall back on "it must be trolling because I don't understand it".
DeleteLots of folks trashing the book on this thread but I might add that she wrote a series of books with each one aimed at a slightly higher age group which is somewhat amazing considering how long it takes to write, and publish. I think it kept her fans from aging out of Potter fanaticism over the span of the series. Perhaps it was luck, and they just got more advanced in theme and plot complexity as she got a bit more experienced as a writer. Perhaps.
ReplyDeleteI was 26 in 1997 and a hellion. My girlfriend (now wife) introduced these to me about three years later...she was nannying for two young kids that were reading the books. I read the whole lot, for "completion's sake." I found them insipid and their take on magic to be anything but magical. Rowling is example A of "things bad with modern fantasy."
ReplyDeleteMy son (current age 12) has read the entire series at least twice and loves them. My daughter (age 9) has NOT read the books (maybe the first?) but has seen all the films, multiple times, and loves them (my children watch way too much television). We've been to the "Wizarding World" (or whatever it's called) in Orlando. They are big Potter fans. It is a source of much sighing and eye-rolling from Yours Truly. Lowest common-denominator stuff...but people who grew up with it (kids born in the late 80s) are now in their 30s. This is how it works. My uncle is 10 years older than me and has no interest in anything Star Wars...doesn't get it or see the appeal. He wasn't exposed to it in his formative years as I was. It is the way of the world.
At least my kids both read still, and neither owns their own phone/tablet. And both play D&D. That's something.