Friday, April 3, 2009

Harry Potter is like chat history

Yes, you read that right. Bear with me-- I know it's very late at night/very early in the morning, and I have homework I really should be doing, and I'm tired (in fact, I had typed that earlier request as "bare with me" which is TOTALLY A DIFFERENT THING) but I had this mini-epiphony (minipiphony?) on the phone with Hayley earlier tonight and it occurred to me that it would make a nice, short blog post.

So yeah. Harry Potter is like chat history.

To understand that statement, you need to understand skype and my friends. Skype saves the transcripts of every textual conversation; as such one can easily go back and reread old chats when one is feeling nostalgic or lonely. While this can be fun, it can also be kind of painful and sad.

Enter Potter. This is like the third blog post I've written here about my suddenly wishy-washy sentiment towards the books. It's not a question of loving them-- of course I do-- it's more a question of how. And I realized something.

It's not just (or not exactly) that Potter was an event, and that we were participating in the storyline actively as each book came out. It's not just about surprise plot twists. And as much as I adore having all the books out and having them memorized word for word and engaging in deep analyses, it's just not the same. It's not the way I want to love them. Because no matter how great the Potter books are, as novels, that's not why I read them. I read them because I care desperately about those characters. They feel like my friends. I want to spend time with them.

And experiencing the series now, knowing I'll never get to see anything new with them... it's like I'm stuck reading chat history.

THOUGHTS?