Harold Bloom is flapping his gums again bout Stephen King. (The site requires registration and will probably be gone in a day or two and besides, do you really want to read an article by Harold Bloom?) He's going on about how this is another sign of the dumbing down of America etc etc blah blah blah.
Then he goes back over old ground. He talks about Harry Potter and the article he wrote attacking it: "But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now only read J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not."
And right there it shows how wrong headed he is. Look, the problem with kids not reading is not that they are not reading intelligent things, it's that they are not reading fun things. Their time is split between movies, DVDs, video games, TV, running outside and playing on the swings, and books. And if they aren't grabbed by the fun of a book (like many kids are by Harry Potter) they won't get into the habit of reading books. And if they are not in the habit of reading books, they won't end up reading Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo and James Joyce and Walt Whitman and all the other people Bloom praises ad nauseum.
To sum up: You want your kid to read? Show them it can be fun.
Now walk the plank Bloom, you scurvy dog. Arrr.