Celebrating Harry Potter

The Beginning of the End:

Celebrating Harry Potter

In case you’ve somehow missed the news, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, opens on Friday. Fans have been counting down to this date for months. The worldwide Premiere was in London last week. New York is celebrating the premiere this week. For the fans, it is a week of excitement as movie parties are planned around the world. The HP fandom is rabid and diverse, and most of us proudly wear the label of at least a little geeky. I dedicate this post to all my wonderful, geeky Harry Potter friends, real and virtual, who have made this journey so fun.


Like me, most of my geeky friends are insanely excited about the opening of Deathly Hallows Part 1. Three friends are in NYC now for the premier. I have a group of friends who are going to the Midnight showing overnight Thursday. They plan on getting in line around 4PM. They’ll be playing games while queuing up. Some will be in costume as characters from the series. I won’t be with them because of other obligations, but I’m going to a late showing on Friday night with another friend who is also a big fan.


While my friends and I are looking forward to the premier, it is, at the same time, bittersweet. Tempering our excitement is also a sense of melancholy. I’m not sure why. True fans know how the story ends. We’ve known since 21 July 2007 when the final book was released and we devoured it in the course of a day or weekend. But we still had films of books six and seven to look forward to, and the opening of a theme park called The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Yet most of us have been watching the premiere frenzy with a sense of also saying goodbye to something that has been a part of our lives for ten years or more.


This is the beginning of the end. There’s only one more film after this, and we know it. There’s nothing to anticipate, although JK Rowling does drop hints that there may be more in the future. And although we’ll have the books and the DVD’s; the theme parks and collectibles; and the HP fandom communities we've built, we’re still saying goodbye in a way. Goodbye to characters and a world we’ve fallen in love with. To a world that was and is sometimes more palatable than our reality. To characters who showed a generation of kids that it is OK to be a little different, a little odd. That the greatest heroes are sometimes the most unlikely. That it is cool to be smart. That love is the greatest weapon, loyalty an admirable trait. That it takes more courage to stand up to our friends than to our enemies. That we all face the choice between what is right, and what is easy. And for those of us who were already grown up when the series started, well, we liked being reminded of those same lessons. We are saying goodbye, or at least learning to relate differently to, a series that has forged friendships, both real and virtual, across the world. 


We’re saying goodbye to a franchise that made readers out of an electronic generation. That spawned the Harry Potter Alliance, a non-profit based on the principles of love and loyalty and friendship in the books and uses them to combat real-world horcruxes. To an imaginary sport that sounded so incredible, it inspired college students to adapt it to reality. They even played the Quidditch World Cup over the weekend. But its legacy is greater than even these things. It is something almost intangible, and hard to articulate. But for any true fan, that legacy is there.


So yes, it is bittersweet. There’s not anything new after this, except re-watching the movies, re-reading the books, and building on the foundations that already exist. I’m not sure we’ll ever see another phenomenon like this. I sure am glad I hopped on the Hogwarts Express for my own chance to experience this magical world and all it has given to me.

Book 8: Harry, A History

Harry, A History,by Melissa Anelli

http://www.amazon.com/Harry-History-Wizard-Inside-Phenomenon/dp/1416554955/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265769526&sr=8-1

Only minutes after I began listening to Harry, A History, I had to turn it off. As I recently explained on my Facebook page, even I am sometimes surprised at my level of dorkiness, and this was one of those moments. Should any of my friends read this post, I'm ready for whatever geek jokes you throw at me. After this book, I know I'm in good company.

When I started listening to the book, I was driving through Atlanta on I-20 on a Friday afternoon. In other words, not the time to be so distracted by a book, so overwhelmed with the emotions it was bringing back to me, that I couldn't pay attention to the road. I simply had to turn it off for something that required less involvement from me. As soon as I could, though, I tuned back into the audiobook and ordered a hard copy of it for future reference.

Harry, A History, opens with the excitement of the impending announcement of the publication date of the final Harry Potter novel, and all that the announcement meant. I remember hearing the date, and getting my notification from Amazon.com that I could pre-order the book. On the release date, I remember giddily greeting the UPS delivery man halfway down the driveway, just to get my hands on the book that much sooner. I remember I had houseguests the weekend Deathly Hallows came out. As soon as they left on Sunday, I barricaded myself in the house, with no internet, television, or radio distractions, and read. I didn’t want any spoilers, and I read the whole book. I had to finish it in one fell swoop because work beckoned on Monday and I just couldn’t take the chance of learning who lived, who died, and how things resolved from any source other than JK Rowling herself. In a much more eloquent manner, Melissa Anelli recounts her similar emotions at learning the date. As webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron, one of the top rated Harry Potter fansites on the web, Anelli has been privy to the inner workings of the amazing Harry Potter fandom. She shares her experiences, and what the books and fans and JK Rowling herself have meant to Melissa over the years.

This book does precisely what it should for any reader who cares deeply about its subject matter. I’m a self-professed Harry Potter fan (Potterfile? Potterhead?). I’m a lot like Hermione in a lot of ways, but hopefully more like her in Books 4-7 than 1-3. Bossy, nagging little swot, wasn’t she, in those early books? But I digress. Anelli brought back to my mind the excitement I felt when I first discovered the Harry Potter books. She began reading the books when she was in school at Georgetown University. She became friends with one of the "cool kids" who also loved the books. She began volunteering with the Leaky Cauldron fan site (http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/) and it wasn't long before her "hobby" began to overtake "real" Life.

I'm only a little embarrassed to admit that at more than one part of this book, I was nearly in tears. Not because anything was that sad, but because it was so close to home, and so fulfilling. Melissa Anelli is passionate about Harry Potter, and she was able to turn this passion into something meaningful in her life. At the same time, she discovered and reported on how a series of BOOKS brought so many people from so many different experiences together.

And to me, that is the best thing about the Harry Potter books. In this era of instant gratification, of the internet and PS3's and Wii's and Twitter and Facebook, etc., etc., etc., it is books that brought together millions of people over ten years. Books! Isn't that amazing? Books!

But back to what I loved about Melissa's account of the Harry Potter phenomenon. I didn't know that the HP fandom is as extensive as it is. I love that Anelli talks about some of the lesser-known sites that fought for the right to discuss the books they loved, and worked with Rowling and Warner Brothers to find a happy medium. I love that Wizard Rock is a legitimate rock genre, which I now know. Special thanks to Draco and the Malfoys, Harry and The Potters, and The Whomping Willows for now having their own playlist on my iPod. Extra Special thanks to Melissa Anelli for letting me know they exist.

I think, mostly, what I loved about the book is that Melissa Anelli got to live her bliss. How many of us can say that? She became passionate about a series of books, and found a cyber community that felt the same. She helped nurture and grow that community. Because she protected the integrity of the series, she earned the respect of her fellow fans, and equally as important, JK Rowling herself. Anelli found a way to turn her passion for writing, and her passion for this magical world of Harry Potter into a book. A thoroughly engaging and enjoyable book for any HP Fan. And finding a way to share your bliss with others, well, isn't that something all of us want in the end?

Bonus Book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I can't really count this book in the 52 in 52 tally because I started it before I began my little adventure. But, I just now finished it, and I enjoyed it. Thought I would write about it anyway.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: http://www.amazon.com/Magicians-Novel-Lev-Grossman/dp/0670020559/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263768099&sr=1-1

What if Narnia and Hogwarts were real? Or even magic itself, like we've read about in these books? Such is the premise of The Magicians. Both the Narnia and Harry Potter sagas are mentioned by name, but of course The Magicians has its own magical land called Fillory. Our hero, Quentin, has grown up reading all about Fillory and its stories and Queens and Kings. I couldn't help but recall all the stories of Narnia with the mentions of Fillory. And like Harry Potter, Quentin thinks he is an ordinary student but finds himself a new pupil at Brakebills, a magical school in New York.

But this isn't some allegory about Christianity and our choices. Nor is it the story of an epic battle between good an evil. While both elements are alluded to and serve as a subtext, the real issue at stake is what happens when we aren't happy enough in our own reality?

The great theme of Harry Potter, that Love can conquer any evil, and that those who love us never really leave us, just happens to be told in a Magical world that exists within our own. Wands and spells are weapons, rather than guns.

As I mentioned earlier, the Chronicles of Narnia are a great Christian Allegory, with Aslan representing the Christ and the final book in the series, The Last Battle, reading much like the New Testament's Revelation. Magic and talking animals exist in Narnia, much like in Fillory.

What makes the Harry Potter and Narnia stories so appealing, and what is the Hook in The Magicians is that so many children and adults who have read these series think how great it would be to live in Narnia, to be able to wave a wand and have the potatoes peeled. In other words, the magic in these books is a means to an end, a metaphor, an agent to progressing a story. I admit that I often joke, "If I only had a house elf..."

This rambling is getting to the point of what would really happen if we suddenly had magic at our disposal? In theory, it would fix everything... but would it? And what if those fabled places of our childhood did exist after all, and we were able to discover them, would we find them to be paradise? Is happiness and contentment a choice, really?

Of course there's some great magical imagery in the book, and complex relationships between the characters. But these questions about what real happiness means are at the heart of the novel. And if you lose everything, what do you have left to find?

Took me a while to finish this book because of this 52 in 52 challenge I set myself, but I'm glad I read it.