Life in the Windy City: Finally Reading Harry Potter
I have been resisting reading any of the Harry Potter books since I first became aware of the phenomenon. At first, my resistance was only on principle (some would say unfounded bias): this was a children's book that was being compared to the masterwork of one of my literary heroes: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. There was no possible way a children’s book could compare to the complexity and depth and texture of a modern-day heroic epic. There have been countless fads among children over the years: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Pokemon, etc. I wasn’t going to bother with some Scottish boy wizard.
I was open-minded enough, however, to read an excerpt of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Newsweek published one in 1999, a few months before the book was to be released. This only solidified my distaste for all things Harry Potter: the characters were two-dimensional, the plot seemed overly melodramatic, and the syntax and diction were definitely aimed at a child’s reading level. Let me use a food metaphor: Harry Potter was a slice of ham on white bread with mayo, and my appetite in my adult years leans more toward piles of smoked turkey with sautéed mushrooms and havarti cheese on dark rye bread. I like more substance and flavor in my reading these days, and my taste of Harry Potter didn’t provide it.
Plenty of my friends read the books and loved them. Mary dressed up as Dumbledore for Halloween. Sara spent something like an entire weekend reading the first five books. Bill made a big deal about taking his sons to see the first movie. Mike joked about the possible, and inevitable, porn rip-off titles. I didn’t even want to make fun of Harry Potter. I just wanted him to go away.
As the years went by and I started working on getting my high school teaching certificate, it began to dawn on me that, eventually, merely as a professional necessity, I would have to read Harry Potter. Just about every freshman in the classes I student-taught at Okemos High School had read Harry Potter. It was a common currency among them. If I wanted any credibility at all as a reader and teacher, before I could attempt to bring my students beyond Harry Potter, I was going to have to read him.
But even professional necessity wasn’t enough to get me to go to a book store and buy the first of the series: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. There were other things I wanted to read: a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, a collection of short stories by Dan Simmons, the newest Spenser novel, a collection of essays by George Orwell. I usually have about five different books going at any one time, and Harry Potter was not among them. When I gave any thought to Harry Potter, which wasn’t often, I just told myself I would read him when I absolutely had to—when I was finally teaching students who had read him. I’d blast through the book in a day, and be done with it.
But I was also privately worried that reading Harry Potter would go the same way that re-reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time had. This past summer, I thought I should get re-acquainted with some of the books I had enjoyed as a child. I saw A Wrinkle in Time at the local used book shop and snatched it up. I started reading it eagerly. Then eagerness turned to boredom, and them frustration, and I finally just gave up. The book deals with some pretty heady metaphysical stuff, but in such a childlike way that I found myself far too distracted by the questions the book raised for me to enjoy the plot or the characters. I wanted more—more in-depth characterization, a more labyrinth plot, more detailed descriptions, more metaphor and symbolism and other kinds of figurative language. All of these things are present in A Wrinkle in Time—a book I loved so much as a kid that I read its two sequels—but compared to something like The Lord of the Rings (which I also read for the first time as a child of 9 or 10) or Dan Simmons’ sprawling space epic Hyperion (not to mention the other three books in that cycle), A Wrinkle in Time was nothing but fluff. Kid’s fluff. And I didn’t have the patience for it. I had graduated, moved on, found more challenging reading, and I wanted to continue to play in that arena.
At the end of the summer I moved to Chicago and started a job teaching troubled ninth graders. The job was part of a year-old program at Chicago Public Schools that used a curriculum model formulated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As part of this program, teachers were given hundreds of dollars worth of materials: lesson plans, transparencies, computers, overhead projectors, and books, books, books. Part of the structure for the kids in this program would be 20 minutes of independent, self-selected reading each day. And in one of the bins of books I was given was a beaten-up paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was not part of the standard “set” of materials reading teachers were given. It must have been left in there by the previous teacher to use these books, a teacher at another school that dropped the program after its first year. Now I had no excuse not to read Harry Potter.
I need to jump back in time a little bit, here. Chances are when I opened that bin and saw that copy of Harry Potter #1 staring me in the face, I would have taken it home and read it anyway. But what made this chance discovery all the more interesting were the events of the past two weeks, when the first glitch in a budding relationship turned out to be hardcover copies of the first five Harry Potter books.
I haven’t mentioned Lisa in any of my posts yet for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a desire not to get too far ahead of myself: we’ve only been dating for a little over two months, after all. But she figures prominently in this Harry Potter odyssey, so she deserves a mention here.
The short version of the Lisa tale is this: when I first moved to Chicago back in August, I was so bored that I did something I swore I would never do—try internet dating. I wasn’t looking for anything other than conversation and maybe a cup of coffee, but I found a bit more than that. The basics are just another example of the tired online dating cliché: we started chatting on line, kept chatting for hours, then for a few days (although not continuously), then we met for dinner at The Twisted Spoke on Clark, a wannabe biker bar. She was cute, the conversation continued to be good, and we kept seeing each other. Enough of the clichéd stuff. I’ve got plenty more Lisa stories to tell, but for now, I want to start getting back to Harry Potter.
Lisa loves Harry Potter. She has all of the books in hardcover. She owns the movies on DVD. She’s not as much of an HP geek as I am a Star Wars geek (I, after all, have framed posters of Yoda on my walls) but she does unabashedly like this Scottish boy wizard. I did not know this when we started dating. I knew she had a bachelors in both drama and psychology. I knew she was a company member at a non-profit theater in Oak Park. I knew she designed and maintained that theater’s web site. I knew she was from Wisconsin. I knew she liked mystery novels—including Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. I knew she had naturally curly hair. I knew she was Jewish by culture but agnostic by belief. I knew she liked sushi. I even knew she had an allergy to black tattoo ink. I did not know she liked Harry Potter.
I discovered this the first time I visited her apartment in Oak Park. There, prominently displayed on her bookshelf, along with Play Directing, Great Jews of Stage and Screen, The Riverside Shakespeare, The Joys of Yiddish, and books filled with the sheet music to dozens of Broadway musicals, were Harry Potter #1-5.
I admit it: I cringed.
Harry Potter? This fantastic woman, this witty and clever and intelligent and articulate and thirty-two-year old woman liked Harry Potter?
It is a measure of how much I already liked Lisa that I did not run screaming from her apartment (and I exaggerate only a little, here).
I managed what I thought was a fairly neutral “So, you like Harry Potter, I see.”
“And you don’t.” It was a statement. We had already covered that fact that I was a literary snob, even if we hadn’t specifically discussed Harry Potter.
So I told her about the Newsweek excerpt. I had given Harry Potter a chance, and he had disappointed me. I felt no guilt or shame or prejudice—I had actually read some of J.K. Rowling’s writing and not been impressed. I shrugged it off. Lisa liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could overlook the Harry Potter thing.
My snobbish attitude became a joke between us. I could tease her about not listening to popular music (NPR and showtunes are pretty much all she listens to) and she could tease me about being a book snob. We were even.
But she still hinted that I should give the boy wizard a chance.
And then I opened that bin of books and saw Harry Potter staring back at me. When I told Lisa via text message over my cell phone what book I had just started reading, she was incredulous, then happy. “I was planning on picking up a copy for you on the way home,” she texted. “Now I don’t have to :-)”
I figured I’d whip through the book in a couple of days. That was about four weeks ago. A number of things slowed down my usually prodigious reading rate (something like 1200-1400 words per minute): teaching (with all of its planning, grading, and stressing), boredom, and teasing.
The fact that work got in the way of pleasure should come as no surprise. The fact that I, the book snob, often found the opening chapters of Harry Potter boring should also come as no surprise. The teasing, however, probably needs some explanation.
As with A Wrinkle in Time, I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone difficult to read because of its simplicity. Luckily, I hadn’t read this book as a child, so I my sense of disappointment as I read wasn’t nearly as great as with A Wrinkle in Time. This made the reading bearable. But I still found the diction and syntax annoyingly uncomplex, the plot rather drab, and the characters quite shallow. Hagrid’s entrance in chapter four finally brought a little bit of excitement to the book, but Hagrid himself was mostly just an annoying “gentle giant” cliché.
I found reading this book almost painful, and certainly frustrating, at times. This was obviously a rich world that J.K. Rowling had created, and the lack of deep psychological and world-building exploration was frustrating. Yes, I could identify with Harry—what child has never felt alone and picked on and unsure of him- or herself? What child has never suddenly been overjoyed to find that there is at least one skill at which he or she is good? What child doesn’t desperately want to be accepted by his or her peers? But I am not a child anymore. I am an adult. I can sympathize and empathize with this child’s feelings, I can even remember feeling that way myself, but the intervening years have added knowledge and emotional baggage and wisdom. The world isn’t as simple as winning a quidditch match or foiling the plans of the Dark Lord. Whatever I felt when I was Harry’s age has accumulated the weight of years, and I want to read things that address those accumulated feelings, too.
So I took to entertaining myself while reading by pointing out to Lisa all of the “pornographic” and “homoerotic” subtext of the book. I’d take lines like “A magic wand . . . this is what Harry had been really looking forward to” or “Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration” and read them to Lisa in the most insinuating way possible. She’d grimace, then smile, then point out how easy it is to find a subtext that isn’t even there, and I’d make a crack about finally having a use for my MA in English. I knew I was being an ass, but it was a fun way to get through a book I otherwise would have set aside and never come back to.
I finished the book this morning, and, despite my earlier misgivings, despite the fact that I found the characters shallow and the syntax unsophisticated, I have to give J.K. Rowling credit where credit is due. This was a fantastically plotted book. The twist in chapter seventeen caught me completely by surprise (that’ll teach me to underestimate children’s books) and I was pleased to see that even the smallest plot details, like the toilet seat prank mentioned in chapter six, or the wooden flute Hagrid gave Harry for Christmas, found their way into a useful spot at the end of the book. Some of the plot devices, like Hagrid’s baby dragon or Harry’s inherent broomstick skills, were extremely transparent, but overall, although I had a difficult time getting into the childlike sentence structures and the simple premise, I have to admire the skill with which Rowling put it all together.
I’ll never be a Harry Potter fan, but I can certainly see why these books are so popular.
I was open-minded enough, however, to read an excerpt of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Newsweek published one in 1999, a few months before the book was to be released. This only solidified my distaste for all things Harry Potter: the characters were two-dimensional, the plot seemed overly melodramatic, and the syntax and diction were definitely aimed at a child’s reading level. Let me use a food metaphor: Harry Potter was a slice of ham on white bread with mayo, and my appetite in my adult years leans more toward piles of smoked turkey with sautéed mushrooms and havarti cheese on dark rye bread. I like more substance and flavor in my reading these days, and my taste of Harry Potter didn’t provide it.
Plenty of my friends read the books and loved them. Mary dressed up as Dumbledore for Halloween. Sara spent something like an entire weekend reading the first five books. Bill made a big deal about taking his sons to see the first movie. Mike joked about the possible, and inevitable, porn rip-off titles. I didn’t even want to make fun of Harry Potter. I just wanted him to go away.
As the years went by and I started working on getting my high school teaching certificate, it began to dawn on me that, eventually, merely as a professional necessity, I would have to read Harry Potter. Just about every freshman in the classes I student-taught at Okemos High School had read Harry Potter. It was a common currency among them. If I wanted any credibility at all as a reader and teacher, before I could attempt to bring my students beyond Harry Potter, I was going to have to read him.
But even professional necessity wasn’t enough to get me to go to a book store and buy the first of the series: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. There were other things I wanted to read: a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, a collection of short stories by Dan Simmons, the newest Spenser novel, a collection of essays by George Orwell. I usually have about five different books going at any one time, and Harry Potter was not among them. When I gave any thought to Harry Potter, which wasn’t often, I just told myself I would read him when I absolutely had to—when I was finally teaching students who had read him. I’d blast through the book in a day, and be done with it.
But I was also privately worried that reading Harry Potter would go the same way that re-reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time had. This past summer, I thought I should get re-acquainted with some of the books I had enjoyed as a child. I saw A Wrinkle in Time at the local used book shop and snatched it up. I started reading it eagerly. Then eagerness turned to boredom, and them frustration, and I finally just gave up. The book deals with some pretty heady metaphysical stuff, but in such a childlike way that I found myself far too distracted by the questions the book raised for me to enjoy the plot or the characters. I wanted more—more in-depth characterization, a more labyrinth plot, more detailed descriptions, more metaphor and symbolism and other kinds of figurative language. All of these things are present in A Wrinkle in Time—a book I loved so much as a kid that I read its two sequels—but compared to something like The Lord of the Rings (which I also read for the first time as a child of 9 or 10) or Dan Simmons’ sprawling space epic Hyperion (not to mention the other three books in that cycle), A Wrinkle in Time was nothing but fluff. Kid’s fluff. And I didn’t have the patience for it. I had graduated, moved on, found more challenging reading, and I wanted to continue to play in that arena.
At the end of the summer I moved to Chicago and started a job teaching troubled ninth graders. The job was part of a year-old program at Chicago Public Schools that used a curriculum model formulated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As part of this program, teachers were given hundreds of dollars worth of materials: lesson plans, transparencies, computers, overhead projectors, and books, books, books. Part of the structure for the kids in this program would be 20 minutes of independent, self-selected reading each day. And in one of the bins of books I was given was a beaten-up paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was not part of the standard “set” of materials reading teachers were given. It must have been left in there by the previous teacher to use these books, a teacher at another school that dropped the program after its first year. Now I had no excuse not to read Harry Potter.
I need to jump back in time a little bit, here. Chances are when I opened that bin and saw that copy of Harry Potter #1 staring me in the face, I would have taken it home and read it anyway. But what made this chance discovery all the more interesting were the events of the past two weeks, when the first glitch in a budding relationship turned out to be hardcover copies of the first five Harry Potter books.
I haven’t mentioned Lisa in any of my posts yet for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a desire not to get too far ahead of myself: we’ve only been dating for a little over two months, after all. But she figures prominently in this Harry Potter odyssey, so she deserves a mention here.
The short version of the Lisa tale is this: when I first moved to Chicago back in August, I was so bored that I did something I swore I would never do—try internet dating. I wasn’t looking for anything other than conversation and maybe a cup of coffee, but I found a bit more than that. The basics are just another example of the tired online dating cliché: we started chatting on line, kept chatting for hours, then for a few days (although not continuously), then we met for dinner at The Twisted Spoke on Clark, a wannabe biker bar. She was cute, the conversation continued to be good, and we kept seeing each other. Enough of the clichéd stuff. I’ve got plenty more Lisa stories to tell, but for now, I want to start getting back to Harry Potter.
Lisa loves Harry Potter. She has all of the books in hardcover. She owns the movies on DVD. She’s not as much of an HP geek as I am a Star Wars geek (I, after all, have framed posters of Yoda on my walls) but she does unabashedly like this Scottish boy wizard. I did not know this when we started dating. I knew she had a bachelors in both drama and psychology. I knew she was a company member at a non-profit theater in Oak Park. I knew she designed and maintained that theater’s web site. I knew she was from Wisconsin. I knew she liked mystery novels—including Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. I knew she had naturally curly hair. I knew she was Jewish by culture but agnostic by belief. I knew she liked sushi. I even knew she had an allergy to black tattoo ink. I did not know she liked Harry Potter.
I discovered this the first time I visited her apartment in Oak Park. There, prominently displayed on her bookshelf, along with Play Directing, Great Jews of Stage and Screen, The Riverside Shakespeare, The Joys of Yiddish, and books filled with the sheet music to dozens of Broadway musicals, were Harry Potter #1-5.
I admit it: I cringed.
Harry Potter? This fantastic woman, this witty and clever and intelligent and articulate and thirty-two-year old woman liked Harry Potter?
It is a measure of how much I already liked Lisa that I did not run screaming from her apartment (and I exaggerate only a little, here).
I managed what I thought was a fairly neutral “So, you like Harry Potter, I see.”
“And you don’t.” It was a statement. We had already covered that fact that I was a literary snob, even if we hadn’t specifically discussed Harry Potter.
So I told her about the Newsweek excerpt. I had given Harry Potter a chance, and he had disappointed me. I felt no guilt or shame or prejudice—I had actually read some of J.K. Rowling’s writing and not been impressed. I shrugged it off. Lisa liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could overlook the Harry Potter thing.
My snobbish attitude became a joke between us. I could tease her about not listening to popular music (NPR and showtunes are pretty much all she listens to) and she could tease me about being a book snob. We were even.
But she still hinted that I should give the boy wizard a chance.
And then I opened that bin of books and saw Harry Potter staring back at me. When I told Lisa via text message over my cell phone what book I had just started reading, she was incredulous, then happy. “I was planning on picking up a copy for you on the way home,” she texted. “Now I don’t have to :-)”
I figured I’d whip through the book in a couple of days. That was about four weeks ago. A number of things slowed down my usually prodigious reading rate (something like 1200-1400 words per minute): teaching (with all of its planning, grading, and stressing), boredom, and teasing.
The fact that work got in the way of pleasure should come as no surprise. The fact that I, the book snob, often found the opening chapters of Harry Potter boring should also come as no surprise. The teasing, however, probably needs some explanation.
As with A Wrinkle in Time, I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone difficult to read because of its simplicity. Luckily, I hadn’t read this book as a child, so I my sense of disappointment as I read wasn’t nearly as great as with A Wrinkle in Time. This made the reading bearable. But I still found the diction and syntax annoyingly uncomplex, the plot rather drab, and the characters quite shallow. Hagrid’s entrance in chapter four finally brought a little bit of excitement to the book, but Hagrid himself was mostly just an annoying “gentle giant” cliché.
I found reading this book almost painful, and certainly frustrating, at times. This was obviously a rich world that J.K. Rowling had created, and the lack of deep psychological and world-building exploration was frustrating. Yes, I could identify with Harry—what child has never felt alone and picked on and unsure of him- or herself? What child has never suddenly been overjoyed to find that there is at least one skill at which he or she is good? What child doesn’t desperately want to be accepted by his or her peers? But I am not a child anymore. I am an adult. I can sympathize and empathize with this child’s feelings, I can even remember feeling that way myself, but the intervening years have added knowledge and emotional baggage and wisdom. The world isn’t as simple as winning a quidditch match or foiling the plans of the Dark Lord. Whatever I felt when I was Harry’s age has accumulated the weight of years, and I want to read things that address those accumulated feelings, too.
So I took to entertaining myself while reading by pointing out to Lisa all of the “pornographic” and “homoerotic” subtext of the book. I’d take lines like “A magic wand . . . this is what Harry had been really looking forward to” or “Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration” and read them to Lisa in the most insinuating way possible. She’d grimace, then smile, then point out how easy it is to find a subtext that isn’t even there, and I’d make a crack about finally having a use for my MA in English. I knew I was being an ass, but it was a fun way to get through a book I otherwise would have set aside and never come back to.
I finished the book this morning, and, despite my earlier misgivings, despite the fact that I found the characters shallow and the syntax unsophisticated, I have to give J.K. Rowling credit where credit is due. This was a fantastically plotted book. The twist in chapter seventeen caught me completely by surprise (that’ll teach me to underestimate children’s books) and I was pleased to see that even the smallest plot details, like the toilet seat prank mentioned in chapter six, or the wooden flute Hagrid gave Harry for Christmas, found their way into a useful spot at the end of the book. Some of the plot devices, like Hagrid’s baby dragon or Harry’s inherent broomstick skills, were extremely transparent, but overall, although I had a difficult time getting into the childlike sentence structures and the simple premise, I have to admire the skill with which Rowling put it all together.
I’ll never be a Harry Potter fan, but I can certainly see why these books are so popular.
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