My extensive experience with popular fiction
written for people's reading entertainment shows
me - and this is a somewhat crude generalization -
that its heroes and heroines seldom read. They
may, however, frequent concert halls (pop or
classical music), go to discotheques and even
attend the theater or the opera, as those are all
places where one can meet people, and the plot may
be thus furthered.
The more the fiction strives to
be "literary," the more likely
it is that you will find in it
characters who read books, or
live in houses with books. That
allows the author to play a
game with works written by his
literary ancestors, lawful or
not (the game or the ancestors,
as the case may be).
I invested too much time and reading mileage in
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" not
to claim some free miles, as befits a frequent
reader. And as J.K. Rowling book is hailed as
the one thing that sent millions of readers all
over the world back to the book and to reading,
I asked myself - and, indirectly, the authoress
- whether the heroes of her wizardry saga also
read books. The answer, sadly, is no.
In the first book Harry found himself in a
library, where the books behave toward him like
real people (they screamed at him when he
opened them), but generally he himself reads,
unwillingly, only books on wizardry as
prescribed by his teachers on their reading
lists. He does read books on the history of
Quidditch, however. For his part, Ron Weasly
reads comics, and though Hermione Granger (a
girl, of course) is seldom seen without a book
in her hands or her nose in a book, and
although she knows how to use the information
gleaned from the books in real life, neither
she nor the others read for pleasure.
None of them reads fiction, in the same way that
millions of youngsters read about them, which
is strange: Their world is devoid of television
and computers, and yet they do not spend their
leisure time reading! And not because
Rowling's imagination failed her when it came
to books. For instance, in "Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets," Harry finds the diary
of Tom Riddle (a former incarnation of Lord
Voldemort), and discovers a way into the book:
When its pages are written on, the ink seeps in
and then the book provides a written answer
from within, thus creating "interactive"
reading. But maybe this is something that
applies, in Rowling's world, only to
autobiographical writing, the most fictional of
them all.
The most magical of all
What is even more astounding is that in a world
in which all a wizard has to do is point a wand
toward an object, whisper a few select words
and command it to do something, Hogwarts'
students don't even consider commanding a book
to "deliver" its contents to them without them
having to read it, to get the fun of reading
without its toil.
In Rowling's world of wizardry and charms, there
are creative processes that could have been
easily applied by the sorcerer and his
apprentices toward their books. Such is an
example of the intricate and intriguing notion
of one wizard getting into the mind of another,
Legilimency (from legere, to read, in Latin,
most probably). That is something which in our
prosaic world we could call "brainwashing" -
what happens between Harry and his eternal and
mortal adversary, Lord Voldemort.
That is why Prof. Dumbledore instructs Harry to
practice Occlumency (probably from occludere,
to seal off, in Latin) and appoints Prof. Snape
as Harry's personal trainer. Harry, as
expected, is less than a diligent student and
has many reasons to regret it later.
When describing those lessons Rowling make use
of one of her inventions from the prequels, the
Pensieve, (a portmanteau word coined from
"pense," to think, in French and the word
"sieve") a stone basin with ancient runes
around its rim, onto which a wizard can pour
out some of the thoughts from his head, and
they then soak in the water of the basin until
there comes a time for the wizard to pour them
back into his head. In the fifth book Prof.
Snape uses his wand in order to leave some of
his school memories in the Pensieve, in the
unlikely case that Harry will succeed to get
into his (Snape's) head during the lesson.
Harry makeRas use of his teacher's turned back
and peeks into the Pensieve, where he sees a
rather unflattering portrait of his own father.
Later Dumbledore lets Harry look at his
(Dumbledore's) own memories within the
Pensieve, and thus understand some fundamental
truths about himself and his fate.
Rowling probably knows that even if something
can be done with people, it cannot be done with
a book. Even sorcerers wielding magical powers
cannot extract the contents of a book and
experience it in any other way, except by
reading it. The book is the strongest and most
potent (and thus sometimes, yet alas too
rarely, the most rewarding) magic ever
invented.
Thanks to
Haaretz 
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