Harry And Me — Thinking Comes Later

It's like, why even use Google Images when I can just look at Facebook?

It was an otherwise ordinary afternoon in fifth grade when I returned from school to see that Mom had purchased a new book whilst out doing errands that day. On the whimsically illustrated cover there was a funny looking kid in glasses on a broom, diving after a rock with wings on it. Mom explained that this book – which by now you’ve all figured out was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - had been getting a lot of great reviews, and suggested that maybe the two of us ought to read it. I obliged, and so it was that I hopped onto the magical roller coaster of Harry Potter, the Transformers of the literary world.

Now, in the grand scheme of geekdom there are two widely read genres: Fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy deals with magic and mythical creatures and is enthusiastically enjoyed and debated by overweight, unemployed nerds who live in their parents’ basements, while science fiction deals with technology and alien creatures and is enthusiastically enjoyed and debated by overweight, unemployed nerds who live in their parents’ basements. It’s possible to like both, but everybody likes one more than the other, even though at the end of the day they’re basically the same goddamned thing, only one has a picture of a unicorn on the cover while the other one has a picture of a spaceship.

I like science fiction, because spaceships are awesome.

Both science fiction and fantasy depict weird and wonderful worlds, events, and characters, far more glamorous than anything we’ll ever see. The difference is in the explanation – in fantasy, no matter what kind of outlandish shit goes on, you can always make it fit into the story by saying, “Hey, it’s magic!” With science fiction you can explain all the same outlandish shit by saying, “Hey, it’s science!” You don’t even have to explain how it works – in The Forever War, the futuristic human space marines develop a box that generates a large impenetrable field in which technology simply doesn’t work, the explanation for it being “They used, like, all the science to build this thing.” That’s all; at the end of the day, in either genre, you can explain everything with either magic or science. I prefer science fiction, though, because science is real, and even though I understand absolutely none of it, I know that if I cared enough I could figure it out.

So keep this in mind when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter I read. Mom read the entire first book to me over the course of about a month, and when the next book came out we were quick to grab it and read it together as well. When the third book came out, Mom bought it but was taking her sweet time finishing whatever other book she was reading at the time and didn’t want to start on Harry Potter until she was finished, so I took it and read it on my own in a matter of days.* I really liked Harry Potter, up until the fifth book.

*It was your fault all along, Mom.

Sometimes reading for me is like exercise: I do a little bit of it, don’t enjoy it, and then never do it again under any circumstances. This was the case with the fifth Harry Potter - I picked it up, read some, was not immediately drawn in, set it down for a while, and never looked back. None of this was out of any particular malice, mind you, I just suddenly had other stuff that needed doing, and more stuff after that, and now I’m in college and I’ve got a backlog of something like 2500 pages spread over three books to catch up on. As I’ve said before, I’m lucky if I even manage to read the pages I’m assigned to read in the textbooks I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for.

It’s a real shame, too, because Harry Potter seems to have been written for people of my exact age – when the first book came out, all of my classmates and I were the same age as Harry, and we’ve aged more or less in real time with him and his friends. By jumping off the Harrycoaster* halfway through, I didn’t get to compare my experiences on the latter side of puberty with those of the magical and fantastic messiah. It’s like if you grew up in Detroit in the 1960s but never listened to Motown, or if you didn’t get laid in high school and completely missed out on Dungeons and Dragons – it’s a major pop cultural experience to pass up. These comparisons may sound stupid to some of you, but I still know people who shout alohomora! at closed doors in hopes that they’ll pop open, if that gives you any idea of how pervasive Harry Potter is today (to date, the incantation has not opened any doors, but it can be practically applied as a Incite Scorn From Truman spell).

*Not to be confused with the film Hairycoaster or its sequel, Hairycoaster XXX: Five Dollar Footlong.

So here we are – the latest Harry Potter film has been released, and everybody is all up in arms about how it could be an Oscar contender. Whether that’s true or not, the fact that it’s a movie that came out in 2009 means it will most likely be nominated for Best Picture, which means I’ll have to see it, which is a scary proposition. I know the key players in the Harry Potter saga from the time when I kept up with the series, but watching the trailers now I see them surrounded by new and mysterious faces. And what’s the deal with Snape – is he a bad guy, or what? It’s like moving away from your hometown at an early age and coming back to visit several years later – all your old friends are running with a new crowd who you don’t know that well, and you can’t be sure if Snape is legitimately evil or just a huge dick.

I guess I look pretty strange what with my ignorance of the Harry Potter franchise, but for the record, that’s how other people look to me when I find out they’ve never heard of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Truman Capps also never read Angels and Demons, but he could tell you things about Kurt Vonnegut that would literally make you crap your pants.