Heropic Fiction: Why Reading will Survive

Asking why people will continue to want to read when entertainment and information are  freely available via moving images and audio is like asking why people would ever want to walk or run when there are less effortful forms of transport. We like the exercise; and its results.
And I don't mean just decoding words and sentences. A novel interacts with its reader; the imagination supplies much of the content; discovery, thesis and synthesis all happen, and people enjoy this (at least some of us do).
Of all our creations, the written word is the most magical, courtesy of its imaginative scope.
Now, I am not one to disdain a screen of any size. Among the most treasured memories of my medical student years are late night double bills (Frankenstein and BladeRunner) at Glasgow's Grosvenor cinema, and our trusty DVD player has coaxed us through many of the darker days  this past Swiss year. But a movie, requiring less investment, rarely has the sticking power of a book - you just don't value what you haven't paid for.

This has been forcibly impressed upon me by a privileged decade of reading to my children. And what a decade it has been - this Golden Age of Children's Fiction. Two series are special in my memory: Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House books, and Tony Abbot's Droon series. There are about 50 titles in each which together, with various other supplements,  entertained us through a year or two of happy bedtimes. My daughter (9) peeled off some time ago, prospecting alone for new veins of literary gold. But my 7 year old son still  likes to be read to, and is a discriminating listener indeed. Hands down winner is Rick Riordan's excellent Percy Jackson series; a year or two ago, I would have said Droon.
It is a disservice to children's literature to lump it all together as a single genre. I can tell from the title and the cover whether it's worth opening, and as I read I know within a page or two whether the book is going to work, based on the self-deprecating authenticity (coolness) of the hero, the exact ration of action to description, the plausibility of monsters and gadgets (cloaks of invisibility, user-specific weaponry, etc).
Having amassed a cache of knowledge about the books that particularly interest an important demographic - boys and some girls between the ages of, let's say 6 and 14, I've reviewed the commonalities. There are many books that fit, or nearly fit, the specifics below, but in the interest of getting to the end of my blog, I've kept it to 4 superb examples, JK Rowling's Harry Potter, Percy, Droon, and Isabelle Allende's trilogy (City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, and Forest of the Pygmies).
There is always a primary hero and a primary heroine, and often a secondary hero (who may be human, or something else, like the satyr Grover from Percy). The story is told from the primary hero's perspective, and he is always a person who has greatness thrust upon him. The hero and heroine (at least) have "powers" of some kind (ability to control water, shoot sparks from the fingers, communicate with animals). The hero discovers his powers during the course of the novel, whereas the heroine and secondary hero arrive on the page fully aware. There is a benevolent, eccentric adult (Harry Potter's Dumbledore, Droon's  wizard Galen, Percy's Chiron the Centaur, Isabel Allende's crusty grandmother-nature-reporter). There is a remote location, with its own version of altered reality (Harry Potter's Hogwarts, Droon's  underfloor world of Droon, Percy's Camp Halfblood, Isabel Allende's remote parts of the Amazon or Himalayas). There are creatures, good and evil, which, if not precisely supernatural, are at least Beyond The Zoo, and there is, of course, The Antagonist, who, if unchecked, might destroy the very Fabric-of-Life-As-We-Know-It). Oh yes - only the heroes, and maybe their mentor, understand this threat, normal adults being too obtuse or skeptical to see it.
These elements are so constant that their inclusion defines a new genre, which, for want of something jazzier, I'm calling Heropic.
Inspired by the above, and the appetite in my house for more of the same, I've started on my own Heropic: Angus McDream and the Roktopus Rogue. My remote location is the Hebridean Snugglay Islands, and I'll be filing my Beyond The Zoo creatures under Beast of the Post. For more, watch these pages (though I doubt that we'll be gracing any dead trees any time soon!).