Day 35: On Harry Potter

i remember the first time i even heard about "harry potter", talking to ezra about it, or rather asking him about it way back in 7th grade language arts. this was probably around the time the third novel came out, maybe a bit after.

i remember him being worried about reading them, worried that his minister father would find out that he was reading a novel about witches and wizards, about evil, and good. i remember wondering what was it with these books that he would risk some damnation from his father for. i went home one day after one of these talks, and i remember begging my mom to take me to the (then) waldenbooks at the mall to find the first novel.

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i was amazed when i got it home, started reading about the boy who lived. the books took me away to someplace that was so fantastical it was almost real, almost as if we were all living in a world where behind every brick wall there was a wizarding train, or place where wizards secretly congregated in order to protect us all from some evil villain that had a name so taboo it was almost cursed.

or maybe just behind the wall was a place where that evil lurked, waiting, biding time until someone would bring it back into true being, so it could finish what it had begun ten years before.

i blew through the first novel, the second, the third, back-to-back-to-back they took me someplace that was so far from my own little place in the world but was so accepting of me being there. so willing to let me go along for some adventure that i knew i would never even come close to experiencing in life.

i waited with some obscene, obsessive longing after i finished azkaban for "year 4". not really reading anything else, i was just stranded, lost in some summer vacation that wasn't really mine... waiting for my own vacation because i knew that was when the next book would once again take me away.

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goblet of fire did take me away again. it was the first hardcover novel that i bought on its' release day, it was the first novel i really waited for with bated breathe. what was odd after i cracked the cover for the first time was how slow i read it. i knew it would probably be years before i was taken to this world again, and i knew that if i went through it too fast i would flounder, asking myself again and again, "what is going to happen next?".

so from july until september i first myself to read the fourth novel horrendously slow just to try and speed up the wait i knew i would have to endure for book 5.

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and wait i did, but not without help.

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you see, the first four potter novels made me fall in love with reading (and story writing). i don't think i really really read anything until the first harry potter novel.

but right after i finished order i started to read other things, mostly fantasy. i started with dragonlance and realized that harry potter's world wasn't the only place i could escape to. krynn was even more of an unbelievable world, but just as fantastic. a larger cast of characters, a bigger world, sucked me in maybe more so than the allure that potter had the previous year.

like potter i read all 20 or so essential dragonlance novels pretty much in a straight run, and loved, like harry potter, each and every one.

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then 9th grade came along and i discovered the dark tower series. these were another series that i would have to wait four years to see the end to, but these are the novels that changed my life. rockie, these are my way to keep me out of my world.

the way the sai king wove all of his novels into the tower mythos is something i don't think i'll ever experience in another author, and the way it was done drove me to read everything that king wrote; but not only king, the series drove me to read everything.

if harry potter made me love to read, stephen king's dark tower (along with the stand) epic taught me to read. that may not make sense, but it's the only way that i can describe it.

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rockie, i get your compulsion, your need for the books. i don't mean to take away from that, because when i first started reading the potter books i had the need too...

but i also stand by what my last post said, i have read enough outside of potter to see that, while a great series, it is not what i will go back to time and again. it is dry to me now.

i don't mean that in a bad way (and i bought books 4-7 on release day, and loved reading them, guessing what would happen next)... because of what the dark tower means to me, and how it ended, and what it meant to me, it is the series that every other series i ever read will be held against. it spoke to me in a way the potter novels never did, it ended in a way that didn't feel like a cop out, and it defined me in ways i still can't wrap my head around.

i love harry potter really, i love how rowling explained snape probably more than any other villain has ever been explained; that everything was done for love really made me respect snape.

i owe to rowling my love for reading, but in many ways, i owe my life to the dark tower.