Harry Potter

I've been reading those Harry Potter books...I just finished with the third one, and will probably start the fourth one tonight. Erin bought them and read them a month or so ago, and recommended them to me. They're very enjoyable, even though I've never been a huge fan of mysteries or of fantasy material. I like them the same way I liked Roald Dahl's classic children's books, or Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

I've been reading the Potter books while waiting for the bus and the train to and from work, and I've seen a lot of other adults reading them too. I've felt slightly goofy about carrying "children's books" around (too much teasing from my past, perhaps?), but I've also connected with some perfect strangers about reading them. Yesterday afternoon, on the bus from Takoma metro to the house, a little girl and her mother boarded and sat down near me. The mother commented on the fact that I was reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and said she'd liked it and asked me what I thought. I told her I adored it, I was sorry there was only one more book out in print, and I wasn't looking forward to starting the last book. Her daughter asked me why, and I told her the last book was a huge tome and I didn't want to have to carry it around. The girl (I think she was about 10 years old) got large eyes and said, "That fourth book has 37 chapters!" I got the feeling this was the longest book she'd read to date. She seemed very proud of having read it.

I told Erin about this last night as we were getting ready for bed, and I asked him if he'd ever been hooked on reading and had his parents bark at him to turn off the light when he read past bedtime. This happened to me repeatedly throughout my childhood. I had this little blue clip-on lamp on my bed that I'd use to read by well past bedtime, and you couldn't really tell there was a light on in my room unless the hallway was completely dark. Erin said he almost never got in trouble for reading late because he kept a flashlight handy for those books he just couldn't put down. I knew kids who did this, but I wasn't one of them...I'm not really sure why.

I think tonight I'll stay up late in bed reading the latest Harry Potter book, just for old time's sake. Some of the pleasures of my childhood I've sadly forgotten as I've entered adulthood, and this is at least one of them I'd like to reclaim.

home   about me   pictures   commitment   journal-n-writings   Malachite Cafe link-o-rama   email