We pick on J.K. Rowling a lot here, or at least we have in the past.  Not for anything she’s done, of course, but instead to rib her readers for their passion, insisting as they do that her books are, like, so readable.  Which they are, I imagine.  Anyhow, Rowling delivered the commencement address at Harvard University a few weeks ago, and she had some pretty terrific things to say in it.  Take this excerpt:

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Now, that’s an author I can like.