"I Want To Follow These Characters For Forever"

So many times when I love a book or a series or characters I will think "GAH I just want to follow their whole lives. WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO END..CAN'T I JUST HAVE THEIR WHOLE LIFE STORY?" 

But then what happens when you kind of sort of get that chance?

Most of you probably know that the Harry Potter & the Cursed Child script came out this weekend. I feel like many of my bookish friends and Harry Potter loving people have been split on whether or not they want to read it or if they even accept it. 

On one hand people are like, YAY DIVING BACK INTO THIS WORLD. THESE CHARACTERS. AHHH. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS I WANT TO KNOW WHERE THEY ARE/MEET THE NEW GENERATION. And then on the other hand, I know a lot of people who just feel conflicted about Harry Potter canon and this story that really isn't actually a book 8. What if it screws up the feeling of how the series wrapped up? Is reading a script going to capture what the play is?

I feel like I totally understand both lines of thinking. Reuniting with beloved characters and a world you love is amazing but it's also a little scary to also do that. I understand both feelings from passionate fans.

For me, it's a little different. I just finished the series for the first time this year. At 30. You can read my thoughts on reading Harry Potter for the first time at 30 here if you want. I feel like I haven't even had time to dive into the fandom and re-read it and really be in the ~trenches~ of being a Potterhead. I haven't been waiting for new stuff for very long or daydreaming up what they could be doing or what could come next. I'm still on this incredible high from my initial reading of it and I'm just not sure I'm ready to expand my view of this world and these characters. Even though I REALLY just didn't want that series to end, I feel hesitant to pick it up right now. I'm not ruling it out but I'm just personally not feeling like I'm ready for it. It's one of those things where I wish to have this continuation to see my fave characters as adults but then when it's a tangible thing I'm like IDK DO I?? AM I READY??

I will just say....my kingdom for a Marauders prequel though. I feel like THAT I can handle right now. It's still within canon so I feel like my brain could handle it in a way I don't think it's ready to expand on these characters with Cursed Child.

But I don't know...I think I will just be happy for the people who are excited about Cursed Child, be envious of people who get to see the actual production and continue to roll around in the fandom in all of my new Potterhead glee and make my decision about Cursed Child later after hearing what fans think and having some time away from it all.


So now...I am REALLY REALLY CURIOUS to know what you guys think. Do you plan to read it? Why or why not? HAVE you read it already and what did you think?? I want to hear all the feelings and thoughts and opinions on this!

Kimberly wants to know: if you could read any book for the first time again, what would you pick?

If you could go back and read any book/series for the first time again, what would you pick?

This was a Top Ten Tuesday topic back in 2011, so it will seem familiar, however, I was dying to talk about it and see what others would say.

For me, my automatic reaction is, and will most likely always be: Harry Potter.

But this got  me thinking about other books/series that really affected me. What other books would I want to experience again?

The first one that came to mind is the Fire and Thorns series. I ADORE those books, and have read the series twice. However, reading it for the first time was magical. I wish I could recapture that feeling!

The next one I thought of was The Book Thief. Oh, that book. I have suggested it to everyone I can possibly think of. I remember getting the chills the first time I picked it up and was introduced to Death's unique narrative. The storytelling is beautiful. Heartbreaking, but wonderful.

So You Want to Be a Wizard. This is the series that introduced me to the wonderful quote “Reading one book is like eating just one potato chip.” I immediately identified with the characters and fell head over heels in love with the story. I was 12 when I first read it, I'd love to experience that feeling of delight I had when I read it.

Those books were the ones that stuck out to me the most, though there are others. What about you? What would you pick?? Please, share in the comments below!

We Need to Talk About the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Trilogy

Here’s a good question to start: WHY?

For those of you who have read Harry Potter (is there a member of the millennial generation who hasn’t?), you’ll recognize Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as a textbook that Harry and his classmates use throughout the series. It catalogues many of the magical creatures that they encounter throughout the series, and our dear friend J. K. Rowling actually wrote it as a companion to the HP books in the early 2000s. This is all well and good, and I’m sure that a lot of people enjoyed reading it and learning more about the creatures in the books. I haven’t personally read it myself, but I’ve heard good things.

However.

I am baffled as to how they plan to turn a textbook into a movie. NO WAIT, THREE MOVIES. Remember when they made movies out of He’s Just Not That Into You and What to Expect When You’re Expecting? They received a whopping 40% and 22%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes. And those were actual books! Nonfiction, yes, so I’m sure that the titles were only used because they were familiar to their target audience (i.e. women in their 20s-40s) and the plots bear little resemblance to the books themselves, but still. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is not only a textbook, it’s a fictional textbook. A fictional textbook with no plot whatsoever.

This Slate article claims that the movies will follow Newt Scamander, the (again, fictional) author of the textbook, as he…discovers where to find fantastic beasts, I guess. (???) Okay, show of hands: who cares one whit about Newt Scamander? Not me. Bully for you if you do, but Newt had no bearing on the plot of any of the Harry Potter books, so the relationship between this trilogy (oh God, it hurts to even type it) and the Harry Potter series is tenuous at best, and at worst nonexistent.

The one good thing, I hope, about this travesty (I’m sorry, I meant to type trilogy, oh well) is that J. K. Rowling apparently wrote the screenplay, so I guess that’s good. Then again, we could also have a situation on our hands like Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, which led me personally to believe he should stick to books and forget the whole screenplay thing. The first film of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them trilogy will also be directed by David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, but that gives me even less hope because I hated Order of the Phoenix (not as much as I hated Goblet of Fire, though) and I refused to see the sixth or either installment of the seventh, so I can’t really judge his directorial chops very well.

How do you feel about making Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a movie trilogy? Let us know in the comments.

Jen's Harry Potter Summer

Confession:

Until this summer I had only read the first Harry Potter book...which I read the previous summer...for the first time. My Harry Potter summer started back in June when Kelly, Kimberly, and I were discussing Code Name Verity for our collaborative post. Not surprisingly after a while we strayed from our book conversation and somehow it came up that I had only read The Sorcerers' Stone. Somehow that turned into me agreeing to read the entire series. And I did. In twelve weeks I read books two through seven AND watched the first three movies.

Conclusion:

I enjoyed the series a lot more than I thought I would! I'm not much of a fantasy novel girl and didn't think I'd like the books at all. But I loved the world that JK Rowling created and the cast of characters. She even created a fictional character that I hate with a passion, Dolores Umbridge. I have never hated a fictional character so much. I think Hagrid was my favorite character but I also loved Dobby (even though he was a tad annoying at times).

The wizard world...JK Rowling put SO much thought and effort into that and it shows. I swear she literally thought of everything. One day I'll reread the books and probably discover so many things that I missed the first time around.

Reading Harry Potter Beginning to End: Bridget's Experience

Earlier this year, I participated in a Harry Potter (re)read-a-long. I believe it's still going, actually, but I didn't do much with it other than reread the series beginning to end, something I had never actually done before. The closest I had gotten up until this point was before Deathly Hallows came out, at which point I decided it would be a good idea to reread Half Blood Prince. However, I was a little over-enthusiastic and started HBP three weeks before DH was due out, so of course I finished in two days and was left wondering what to do. Naturally, I decided to read Order of the Phoenix...but then that only took me a few days as well. Eventually, I ended up reading all six previous books in reverse order, and then jumped straight into the seventh after finishing Sorcerer's Stone. It was a weird experience.

That fall, I went off to college, of course toting my entire Harry Potter collection with me. As it turns out, this was not the most efficient use of space, as I don't remember picking up any of the books at all that year except for Deathly Hallows. So from then on, that was the only HP book I brought to school with me.

So, now here we are in September and I discover this Harry Potter readalong is happening, and I decide that I have to join. I hadn't read any of them recently enough to have reviewed them on my blog, so I figured it'd be the perfect chance to do just that. Boy, was I wrong.

I blew through them so fast I barely had time to eat, much less review each one as I finished.

Having the next installment immediately at my disposal as soon as I finished was not the best for my productivity outside this project, but boy was it nice while I was reading! I'd say it probably took me only about three weeks to read the entire series again all the way through. For those who have never done this, I would recommend it for a few reasons:

1. You get to watch J.K. Rowling's voice progress from uncertain first time author to the badass we begin to see in Goblet of Fire. It's so interesting to see and wasn't something I really noticed when I was reading them for the first time (partially because I was too young, but also because they came out so far apart from each other). I did notice it a bit when I read them backwards, but obviously it was cooler to see the progression moving forward rather than backward.

2. You don't have to think back too hard to remember what happened in the last book. I remember whenever a new Harry Potter came out, I was always confused for the first chapter or so until I fully remembered the end of the previous book. When you read them all in a row, that doesn't happen and it's awesome! It was a lot easier to pick up on some nuanced things that I might not have noticed, too.

3. You get to see the series as one story rather than a set of stories. This sort of piggybacks on number 2, but I think it deserves its own point because it's important to me separately from my bad memory. The titles of the books sort of lend themselves to the belief that the stories are all separate, except for the fact that they all involve Harry Potter. As we all know, that's obviously not true, but it's a lot easier to see the forest rather than the trees when you put the whole series together and read it as one story.

Has anyone else had this experience? Did you do the readalong or did you just do it on your own?