Before describing our adventures with young Harry, I must confess that I did not learn of the book through advanced literary channels -- at least not as those are imagined in an academic sense. I first heard about the magical fellow while sitting with other parents watching our children practice karate. The other parents know I teach literature at UCLA. They showed me that the pressure to know about everything published doesn't end with Ph.D. exams: "So what do you think of 'Harry Potter'?"

"Oh," I answered, eyes fixed on the gyrating bodies, "is that the blond-haired kid with the wicked roundhouse kick?"

"The book."

So I learned that this is a great book. My wife, Jeanne, and I went from the karate studio to the bookstore, working on our 8-year-old Alec the whole way. He had already heard about the book from other kids. They liked it, but he was wary -- they said it was sometimes hard to read what the characters said. No problem: We'd read it to him. We'd simply continue with our spoon-feeding of books that began before Alec was born. We read all kinds of stories, poems, animal books and the like to Jeanne's swollen belly. We aimed to whet the appetite of the baby growing inside. And we succeeded, but the weaning process was taking a lot longer than we anticipated. We'd hoped he'd start reading them himself by second or third grade, but instead, he waited until we picked up a book with a sigh and read to him. We failed to learn the alchemy that turns a listener into a reader. Perhaps "Potter" could work that magic.

Three years later, as the movie trailers and ads were served up sparingly to a starving public, Alec and I decided to take up the book again. Despite the fact that Alec had developed into an independent reader, he preferred that I do the honors with Harry. Alec noted that it was important to perform well the voices and the accents (a friend who does a wonderful Scotsman had spoiled Alec's ear).

My son likes a story with a surprise or unexpected ending. "Potter," book and movie, supplies some tantalizing twists as the tremulous Quirrell is revealed as an evil manipulator, and the apparently snakeish Snape turns out to be Harry's protector.

But Alec wasn't convinced by Quirrell's act. He said that the actor showed signs of confidence beneath his obviously manufactured stutter. Of course, that's the part that gets me drooling. Perhaps the actor cleverly provided signs of confidence as clues to the savvy viewer about his true character. Maybe his true character is insecure; he is, after all, Valdemort's dupe -- even more, his physical host. It might be that Quirrell subtly represents a conflicted character, not good-versus-evil so much as insecurity-versus-confidence, a more immediate concern, I would guess, to the pre-teens and adolescents who've flocked to the bookstores and movie theatres.

Some magic, some force that defies explanation draws non-readers to the book and adults to a kids' movie. About a week after we saw the movie, I found one of Alec's "Animorphs" books in a pile of his dirty clothes. He'd gotten the book down on his own. Magic, indeed.