I just returned from a short vacation, where two events served to emphasize one of my most cherished beliefs: Books are better than television.

I don’t watch much television. Baseball games are the one exception to my rule, but this season — even early in the year, when the Rockies were still winning — I’ve managed to resist the temptation. I read instead, and there are enough newspapers, books, magazines and catalogs around to prevent me from ever growing so bored that I must resort to television. This holds true even on vacation. It’s been years since I turned on a hotel-room television set.

Unfortunately, the television set holds a prominent place in the only communal room in my husband’s parents’ home and in their lives. This past week, because it seemed rather rude to retreat to the bedroom, I was exposed to such treats as a channel that shows weddings non-stop, an all-day dog-show channel, reruns of Seventies game shows, and closed-captioned offerings that told me more about contemporary song lyrics than I ever wanted to know.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I also caught a glimpse of a commercial in which a pathetic man fashioned a female "special friend" for himself out of Rice Krispy Treats. Ill-mannered or not, I sought refuge in the bedroom. Someone asked, through the door, "Got a special friend in there?" Let them believe what they wanted; I wasn’t about to come out.

I survived that trauma, though, and as we continued on the rest of our vacation, I noticed an opposing phenomenon. Everywhere I looked, I saw children with Harry Potter books.

They occupied the benches in front of Cabela’s, a shrine to outdoor sports and conspicuous consumption, in Sidney, Nebraska. They sat quietly in hotel lobbies and around the pool. At least one could be found in every restaurant. They congregated in the several bookstores we visited. In one of those shops, a group of parents fought loudly over what apparently was the last copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but even that impolite behavior surely was an improvement over fighting about Beanie Babies or Tickle Me Elmo.

The Harry Potter fans ranged in age from precocious tiny ones to teenagers who seemed past the age at which most would want to be seen reading any book, let alone a children’s fantasy series, and even on to adults who didn’t seem to have any children in tow. They all had one thing in common.

They were reading! They were doing it voluntarily!

Now, these aren’t great books, but believe it or not, they’re really good ones. The humor is gentle. The "bad" characters usually are naughty rather than evil. The good characters are obviously good but equally obviously not perfect. In the end, they triumph, and while they have quite a time of it, we never doubt that they will.

Parents may wish their children preferred a higher class of literature, but they need to remember that Harry Potter isn’t competing only with Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis; television, popular music and peers are also vying for these readers’ attention. Even a mediocre book is a good thing in that case, and if any literary character can catch and hold the attention of this generation, more power to him and his creator, J.K. Rowling. More importantly, more power to readers.