Status: Brideshead Revisited, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone pg191/223.

Another one bites the dust.

It took me some time to get into Brideshead Revisited, but I’m glad I read it. In fact, I highly recommend it, simply to enjoy the poetry that is Evelyn Waugh. The wonderful first person narratives are what really make this story sing above all else.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

It certainly is a wonderfully vain book, and for that, I love it.

But now, for something I’m itching to pick up again – my childhood love. Harry Potter.

If you don’t belong to the Harry Potter generation, it’s difficult to understand really the attachment any of us have to this book, because it is the only time I know of when a book was considered to be an icon of primary school. Where to some it’s chatter-rings, Pokemon playing cards or Tamagotchi, other’s remember half of their classroom with Harry Potter books in their hands. I was 8 years old when the first was released, and I remember I had friends who had bought the second one when it had been out a month or two. I remember, at 9 years old, sitting outside by the trees, surrounded by others in my year and other years, reading the first two in days, and waiting impatiently for the next. And the journey has continued until the release of The Deathly Hallows Part II on DVD.

I went to the midnight screening when it premiered in NZ, surrounded by people my age – no one under 18 – feeling like I belonged. Because that’s what Harry Potter gave little bookworms like me – a chance to feel cool. And there we all were, being incredibly uncool, cheering on Harry. We were with him all the way.

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