After a nearly year-long hiatus from my blog, I’ve decided to start it up again. (Yes, this is probably one of countless optimistic “I’m totally going to do a lot more writing this year!” posts that hit the Internet in the past week.)
But I was busy during all that time when I wasn’t blogging, and for the past couple of months, things have been substantially less busy. This fall, I quit my newspaper job (the job that kept me writing stuff for several hours each week day and had me all worn-out and sick of writing by the time I got home) and moved far away. And right now, I’m not working as much, which means I’m doing lots of reading. (Or trying to, anyway.)
I’ve been intermittently reading Moby-Dick for the past few months, and while it’s thematically appropriate to my newfound coastal surroundings (Nova Scotia), I wanted something lighter to read on my breaks from it. So, I relented to years and years of peer pressure and read the Harry Potter books. All seven of them. And I absolutely loved all of them.
This is a departure for me, as I’ve spent 13 or 14 years complaining that the books are stupid, targeted at 11-year-olds, and too black-and-white and simplistic. And… I was wrong, on all counts. I think part of the reason I resisted them for so long is that they came out when I was too old to read kids’ books, but too young to read them as an adult, and I was afraid of people (gasp!) thinking that my reading level was lower than what it actually was.
Everyone knows what the books are about, so I’m not going to review them other than to say that J. K. Rowling has created a world that I want to live in. The characters are all believable—against an epic backdrop of magic and a battle between good and evil, Harry and his schoolmates are, above all, teenagers. That means that while they’re sometimes insufferable, they’re always realistic and relatable. Rowling’s prose isn’t especially memorable, but it’s clean and it propels the story along. There’s so much crammed into those seven books that I was actually kind of lonely when I finished the last one.
Also, I took advantage of my newfound unemployment to participate in National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that challenges thousands of people all over the world to dump 50,000 words of fiction onto the page during the month in November. I “won,” meaning that I finished, as did about 14% of the other participants. (I can’t brag, as I had very few other obligations in the month of November, aside from reading the Harry Potter books, taking lots of walks and bike rides, and baking a lot of cookies.) The book, which I’m planning on revisiting and editing at some point this year to see if it’s actually salvageable, is a satirical detective novel loosely based on a town I once covered for work (a New England town that shall not be named, though I will hint that it rhymes with “Beast Frampton.”) That’s all I’m saying for now.
So glad you finally read the Harry Potter books! I had the same reaction when I finished book seven. I missed my friends.