Books

Book 568: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter #4) – J.K. Rowling

The primary reason I will always advocate this book series over the films is the amount of detail Rowling includes to flesh out her characters and her stories. From the minor characters that aren’t even mentioned in the films to the side adventures Harry, Ron and Hermione take somewhat regularly you’re missing out on so much if you’ve never read the books.

And the text books and books Hermione reads! OMG, so many are just throw away lines and titles but what I wouldn’t give to read An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe or Hogwarts: A History or any of the others that are mentioned! I actually got super excited that she’d released Hogwarts: A History, but it’s actually Harry Potter: A History of Magic. I guess I can’t really be mad, but fingers crossed it’s next!

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Books

Book 566: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter #3) – J.K. Rowling

This re-read, like each one before it, is about what I noticed more this time than I did the other times I’ve read the books. The older I get the more my perspective changes and the more I’m like oh yeah that makes sense from an adult perspective but then I’m also like OMG WHY IS NO ONE PROTECTING THESE CHILDREN? That and of course how young Harry, Ron, and Hermione (who are 13ish in this book, and all the other teenagers that end up fighting Voldemort)! It’s crazy.

Even more than those two things above, the thing that got me reading this book was how lackadaisical the wizarding parents seemed in this book. Sure it gets worse in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

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Books

Book 564: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter #2) – J.K. Rowling

I finally caved and bought digital copies for my kindle. It’s good because it’ll allow me to read them when I travel if I have nothing else to read. And it’s also good because it means I’ll get rid of my “reading” copies bringing my total number owned down by seven, which I know Tim will appreciate 🙂

I’ve read this countless times and have already posted one response to this back in July 2012. I don’t recall loving this one when I first read it, but I also didn’t have that strong of an antipathy for it either. It carries the story forward in a way that works and I appreciate that. What I do notice more and more the older I get and the more-often I read the books is I find so many hints that Rowling dropped for the later novels.

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ARC, Books

Book 563: You Are Not Alone – Debbie Augenthaler

When the publicist reached out to me about this book I said yes.* I didn’t know if I wanted to say yes, because my mother had passed only weeks before, but I knew at some point I would want/need to read this.

In many ways, I wish I would’ve read it sooner or at the very least before I read Grief Works. What I was looking for in Grief Works, an in-depth “this was my experience of grief” story and this is how I survived, struggled, thrived, etc.

I teared up a few times reading this one, not so much because of my experience (although that did happen at least once), but because of how heartfelt and how beautifully written Augenthaler’s work is. She goes in-depth into what feel like the four stages of grief and even talks about them at some point, but on the whole she stays pretty far away from psychotherapy babble and writes about her personal experience.

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Books

Book 562: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter #1) – J.K. Rowling

I think the strangest part about re-reading this is what I notice now as a 33-year-old. The things I notice now are vastly different from when I read it last in my twenties, almost exactly six years ago, and any time I read it prior to that.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read this book or this series. Low-balling it I know for a fact I’ve read this particular book at least 10 times. I read it each time a new book in the series was released and I’ve read it at least three times since I’ve lived in Boston. And one of those was in Spanish!

There were two things that really got me when I read the book this time. There was a third one that caught me off guard when I read it and may completely change my re-read of the series this time through the lens it brought into focus.

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