A Harry Potter Education

grateful for my 2010 crash course

When I was a kid, I did not love to read. I read books, of course – I was a good student and competitive so I always did my reading homework and completed my Scholastic book challenges but otherwise, I don’t have childhood memories of devouring books or loving SSR time during the school day. 

In the late 90s, when Harry Potter took the world by storm, I was not a part of it. Like many of my peers, I did not wait in bookstore lines or pull adolescent all-nighters to read the newest book on the release date. I did not understand the hype – nor did I try to.

Harry Potter was not on my radar to care about until college. College was when I first dabbled in reading for pleasure and a friend raved to me about HP. She pushed me to read them and then lent me the entire series. I started and made it through the first few books but then unceremoniously abandoned the pursuit. I was just not that into reading yet and not into Harry Potter enough to give it a go for that many pages. 

And that was that. Until I moved to Italy and into an apartment with roommates who had been the type to wait in bookstore lines and pull adolescent all-nighters with the newest release. And gosh, I am so thankful for their HP crash course. 

Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash

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a harry potter education.

Originally posted on 20 November 2010

my roommates are avid harry potter fans.  since we moved in together in late august, V and L have been hyping up the premiere of the 7th and final harry potter film.  the whole time, i’ve been nodding in agreement of the excitement while not really being fully in on it.  finally, with the quickly approaching premiere date, their excitement became infectious and i made the decision to jump on the bandwagon.

a few years ago (3rd year of college), i began reading the series but i quit halfway through the 4th book.  so i borrowed book 4 from one of my students (naturally) and picked up where i left off.  this proved much more complicated than i had anticipated because of the infinite number of tiny little details that i failed to remember from my prior reading of books 1-3.  also, it was difficult for anyone to answer my questions because they had read the whole series and thus, knew way more than i did and risked giving away important surprises.

and then, last tuesday, we went to go bowling in slovenia (they do that there – everyone always wants to go bowling, we don’t quite understand the hype).  however, much to our friends’ dismay, bowling couldn’t happen and we ended up wandering around the mall.  this mall happens to also contain a movie theatre and we discovered that harry potter and the deathly hallows (part 1) would, in fact, be playing on thursday at 8:50 pm.

we all bought tickets.

so.

we arrived back to our apartment at 9pm tuesday night. at that moment, i had read 3.5 of the HP novels and had seen NONE of the movies.

i had a lot of work to do.

i realized that it would be impossible to read the rest of the books in the hours i had until the 7th movie so i began my quest to watch movies 1-6.  yes, i realize that this is cheating slightly, since i was watching movies 4-6 before reading the books, but these were dire circumstances.

i stayed up until 130 tuesday night (wednesday morning) watching movies 1 and 2 and then watched 3-6 on wednesday. before school, during lunch and recess and immediately when school ended, i was watching harry potter. it was insane. and incredible.  i had loads of moral support (i never could have made it through #5 wednesday night in the dark without faithful-roommate-L by my side).

but i made it! and we went and it was amazing. a little scary at times. but incredible. however, it was terrible that i was the only one out of our group that went who doesn’t know what is going to happen in HP7 (part 2) so i have got to get reading so i can find out what happens in the end!!!!!

[it’s like when i watched the entire series of lost during the final season and had to keep myself from googling what was going to happen next]

check out the trailer here.  let your mind be blown.

xx!