I met Harry the year the first book was published. Our oldest son was in second grade and it looked like Harry was going to be a very popular fellow, so I decided to preview the book to make sure it got the parental seal of approval. Around the same time I read one of the ubiquitous Goosebumps books. It was awful: poorly written, parents were either non-existent or just plain stupid, sibling relationships were atrocious. We gave it a hard pass.
By contrast, I found Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone to be a really good yarn – clever and creative. But I was uncomfortable with some of the dark aspects of the story for someone as young as our son, and the author said future books would get even darker. It also got wildly divergent reviews in the Christian/homeschooling communities. Some people worried about young impressionable children getting lured into witchcraft, others felt that Harry was not a good role model, often getting away with lying and not always facing the consequences of his actions. It was thought that the line between good and evil was not clearly enough drawn. So, even though there were plenty of Christians who loved the series, we ended up giving it a “soft” pass, thinking maybe when our kids were older we would revisit it.
Fast forward to around 2013. While visiting one of the younger families at our church, we found out their dog’s name was Hagrid. “That’s an interesting name,” I said, “Where did it come from? Is it a family name?” The whole family eagerly pitched in to tell of their love for the Harry Potter stories (and if you haven’t read them, Hagrid is a dearly beloved character in the books). We were going to be taking two long road trips to Idaho and back that summer and decided to borrow the audiobooks from my sister. On your mark, get set…GO!
The excellent Jim Dale does a masterful job of reading these books and we were hooked right from the start. We plowed through 3-4 books that summer on the road and found time to listen to the rest of them over the next year. One time after 8-9 hours of driving we drove into our garage with only 15 minutes left of the book. We stayed in the car and finished it.
So how did we overcome all those objections and what made us love these stories so much? I’ll tell you in another blog post, since this one is already getting so long.
I started collecting the hardbound editions of the HP books right after we finished listening to them, but I set a silly goal of buying only nice used editions to save money. It was relatively easy to find books 2-7 at used book stores, but it turns out that NOBODY gets rid of the first book. NOBODY. So after all these years, I finally just bought a new copy of the first book – and it was less than $13.00, for Pete’s sake! Sometimes you can be too thrifty.
My collection is complete! That’s the whole reason I started this post.
Now if I were a normal person, I would have said something like: “I just bought the first Harry Potter book to complete my collection” and this blog post would have been a lot shorter. I’m not normal. And if you’ve read this far, you’re not normal either, for which I’m very thankful.
Next week’s Monday Musings will take up where this one left off.
I’ll probably delete this in the morning by saying “Evanesco!”
Lynniebeemuseoday 