Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t finished the last books! I can’t sit on some of my thoughts any longer. Don’t worry though, I’ve pointed out when/where you can start skipping. *wink*

You can’t please everyone all the time. That’s just reality. But there’s no way getting around the amazing phenomenon created by J.K. Rowling’s series on Harry Potter. Call it whatever you want but at the end of the day millions of kids and adults alike have jumped into books and that has been unprecedented in my lifetime. The movies are added fluff and have captured an audience all their own even for those who have never read any of the books. I don’t think anyone can argue the success of it all.
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It was a full weekend of reading for us. We bought two Harry Potter books on Saturday and started reading that afternoon. I had too many interruptions with dinner and bedtime routines to get more than about halfway before bed and finished last night. But Blake stayed up until the wee hours of Sunday morning to finish. He was a little anxious for me to get through it yesterday. I won’t give any spoilers at this time but I have to say I was happy to be proven right about my theories. I have decided that I need to go back and re-read books five and six again because there was a lot that came up in this one that I couldn’t quite remember.

We also took in the most recent Potter movie while on vacation. It was everything I expected and I enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see more of the Weasley twin’s mischief but you simply can’t fit much more than they did into the time window for a movie. It’s so fun to go back and see some of the early shows when the trio were so young. It’s always kind of weird to watch actors grow up with a series. It’s also interesting to see what it does to your reading experience once you have an actor’s rendition of a character in your head. Pre-movie was a time when you had to create the image of the characters in your mind but with the movies coming out during the book series it flip flopped - at least for me. In the later books I could see and hear the actors like Snape and Rita Skeeter in my head as I read about them.

It’s been such a fun and interesting journey with Harry Potter. There was so much hype about it when they first came out that I had no interest in reading it whatsoever. But then about a week before the movie came out both my husband and I decided maybe we’d read it as we’d already heard so much speculation about what they’d have to cut out to make it a movie. There was a book sitting at his mom’s and I picked it up to start reading. I didn’t put it back down until I was finished. It was a fast and engaging read and we were both really glad we’d read the book just days before the movie came out so we’d understand more what was going on. After that it was easy to want to read the next book installments even though they continually got longer and longer.

As we talked about it yesterday a little my husband pointed out something very important. It was that these were written as children/youth books. Therefore some of the storyline and developments were more basic than I may have liked, or at least as my imagination flourished, as the series progressed, but to keep it in perspective I think it was right on. The fact that it could engage so many adult readers is a tribute to the style of writing and story in my mind. For more fun reveiws visit Blake. *wink*

Anyone else out there a Harry Potter fan? What has your experience been?

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