Negotiations at a standstill (8/10/05)

Some serious negotiations are under way at our house, and Harry Potter is involved.

No, not the wizard himself. The books.

It started long before the latest in J.K. Rowling’s string of best-sellers hit the bookshelves — or, in the case of LoBill’s in Portland, the produce shelves.

All of my daughters have become devotees of the Potter books. And my wife has joined them.

I’m left — alone with the dog, whose reading skills are sub-par — out in the cold, so to speak. As they exchange speculation about plots and characters and future twists the author may have in mind, I remain blissfully clueless.

Well, perhaps not blissfully.

I’ve been under a certain amount of pressure to go over to the other side, to defect to the Potterites and pick up one of the doorstop-sized volumes while on vacation.

And I don’t respond well to pressure.

In fact, it tends to make me stubborn, especially where books are concerned.

Unfortunately, I’ve already passed along this trait to my children, who can tell you that — during their adolescent years — the fastest way to guarantee that they would not read a book was for their father to recommend it.

It’s not a particularly redeeming character trait. In fact, it can be irritating. But it’s real, and we’re stuck with it.

Trouble is, I just can’t get too excited by the subject matter. I’ve watched the movies — after a certain amount of prodding — and will admit to being entertained.

But when it comes to a book for the beach, Harry’s staying on his shelf.

At least he was, until the negotiations started.

I can’t remember whose idea it was, probably mine in a desperate attempt to get my daughter Sally off my back.

How about, I suggested, if I read a Harry Potter book and you read one of the books I’ve been recommending?

Sounds fair enough, but now we’re trying to determine parity between her Potter and my recommendations.

Sally insists that I’ll breeze through the first Potter book in no time, but I’m trying to put a premium on my resistance.

It wouldn’t be fair, I have argued, for her reading my favorite novel, Ali and Nino, to be equal to my reading the first Potter. I ought to get something extra, I figure, simply because it’s not a book I’d ordinarily opt to read.

So I’ve been weighing my alternatives, good books I’ve enjoyed in the past year or so that no one else in the family has picked up, particularly short stories by William Trevor, novels by Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri, and poems by Ted Kooser.

Sally, meanwhile, is countering that it needs to be a book for book trade-off and there should be some equivalence between the two. At the moment, there is no end in sight.

Maybe we’ll get it sorted out before the final book in the Potter series appears.[[In-content Ad]]