Harry Potter - The Series

J. K. Rowling

I am sure no one reading this has ever even heard of this series so let me lay it out for you . . .

Kidding.

I admit I must be the last person on the planet to read the Harry Potter series. In fact to date I have only read one but I thought I would do a continuous posting about the series since many of you have read, dissected, regurgitated and read the series again. Second, there is SO much written about the series I will not attempt to enter that dialogue. I do not want to become a Harry Potter know-it-all, there are lots of them online who have been chewing on this material for a LOT longer than me.

Feb 25: Finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
This simple yet imaginative book about a boy who does not think he has much going for him finds out he has magical powers and indeed has his own cult following. Not really comprehending the broader reality due to the urgent needs in his concrete reality (not getting beat up by his cousin and their unruly gang) he changes course at life's instruction at age 11 and the world of magic opens up to him. A miracle for the boy who was formerly allowed only to sleep under the stair case and had the family scraps on a good day and went hungry on a bad day.

What does it mean to suddenly realize you have something special when you thought yourself ordinary or down right looked down upon prior? How do you respond to that special gift? How do you treat others after acknowledging this gift?

I look forward to learning more about Harry's response to these questions and of coarse to the mysteries alluded to in this first book.

Book 13

March 1: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
To me this one was exploring the role of predestination and freedom of choice as Harry struggles to find out if he really was a Slytherin, the school prone to the Dark Arts, and if so did that mean he was somehow destined for the Dark Arts too. I liked this question and enjoyed his struggle with the question. In the end, Dumbledore says "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." A challenging thought for anyone!

I really found Lockhart a difficult character to stomach but I suppose that is the point! I continue to like Hadich (he was framed!) and Hermione (I love a serious student!) and of course Harry and Dumbledore.

I was mystified as to why Harry didn't tell Dumbledore everything he knew when he asked him if he had something to tell him. I was also surprised at how little he inquired about his parents heritage given his struggle for his own identity. There were not enough Quidditch matches in it for my taste!

Book 14

March 4: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
I failed to blog after reading this since I just launched right into book 4. I liked the twists and surprises with Sirius Black. Almost as an answer to my above blog entry on book 2, you learned a lot more about Harry's parents which was very important. Their connection to Sirius and the whole way you learned the story was great fun. Dementors are frightening! I love that you defeat them partially by focusing on your happiest memories.

Book 15

March 8: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
This was the best book by far. I feel like the three previous books were laying the foundation for this one. All the people Harry had developed relationships with, all the ways that he had "done the right thing" and all the hurt and struggle he had been going through with the loss of his parents and his crappy muggle family were all leading up to this story. It was riveting! My only regret was how many chores we had to do this weekend so I didn't get to just sit and read until Sat night. The tournament was so interesting and intense, but then to have the whole thing turn on its head at the end of it was wonderful. Very exciting, engaging and inspiring book! This one hooked me, I am a fan of little Mr. Potter.

Book 16

March 15: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Book five proved to be slightly torturous. I enjoyed the torture, it was a great book. With the power of the dark side closing in, reminiscent of Nazi Germany through the Ministry and the person of Umbridge, and utter hopelessness about anyone ever believing Harry's last encounter with Lord Voldemort through most of the book I was quite indignant and upset. I also greatly missed Quidditch!

I really expected more from Sirius. Not that he was in any place to suddenly become a parent to Harry but I think the relationship between them could have been fostered more deeply. Certainly, when they ended up back at Order of the Phoenix for Christmas break there was ample time for connection and conversation. The entire year/book I felt Harry was going through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and all he needed was someone to talk to. Therapy or a parental unit or at least a mentor. Yes, Dumbledore failed to see the human needs of a human child. Alas, no magic can make someone not miss their mum!

The mirror that Sirius had given Harry made me so sad. That was all he needed to do was have a way to communicate and a lot of this would not have happened. Harry's perceived protection of Sirius ended up being his death.

Now he has even more need for therapy than ever! If Dumbledore doesn't step up to the plate and finally teach and love Harry himself, I will be damned!

At least all the cards are on the table and he can at a minimum not have to deal with the horrific adolescent indignity of your peers laughing and jeering at you as if you are some kind of freak.

Book 17

March 24 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Well, Dumbledore certainly stepped up to the plate. The book was exactly what I wanted to experience after book 5. They really do get better and better.

I cried at the end. I can't say much more. I am quite devastated.

Book 18

March 30 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Very wonderful amazing series. I feel like I lost a friend now that it has ended. I started it on Feb 28 and finished it Monday, March 30. I want to read it again without interruption. What a nerd! I will take myself on a vacation and just read the whole series cover to cover in a few years.

Alaster "Mad Dog" Moody was I think my very favorite character. Hagrid is up there in the top few, he was after all the one who first broke it to Harry that he had magical power! Snape turned out to be just as complex and interesting as Dumbledore, all favorites. Of the kids, I guess Hermione and Ginny were my two favorite (I am assuming Harry was a favorite of course). I loved the twist on Nevill Longbottom in the last book. The whole idea of Hogwarts as torture chamber was brilliant.

The battle was mind blowing. I loved it better than Quidditch. Not much to say that has not been said already. It is a beautiful series with a lot to enjoy and appreciate!

Book 19

[mercury under my tongue]

By Sylvain Trudel
Recommended by the New York Times Book Review

Seventeen and dying of terminal cancer. This is a novel. The language is very languid, fluid and heady. It is not so much emotion drawn out of you as the reader but thought. Questions swirl through the pages.

What have I done with my (not so) short life? What is accomplishment, true satisfaction, and contribution (or choosing not to contribute)? What is living life to its fullest? And what if your version is vastly different from those who love you?

One of my favorite side trips in this book is the stark look at being terminally ill and how you feel almost like a side show at a carnival (a freak show). The brutal honesty with which the writer writes about the heavy burden of others' pity, guilt, sadness and pain. The cold reality that often the one undergoing this horrific experience is suddenly the one asked to comfort those around them. Is that the right thing to do? How would we each respond?

I also appreciate the existential questions, philosophical ruminating and religious outcry that takes place in this one small boys last days.

"Outside the winds are sobbing for no one and it's a waste of breath; and the December gusts are hurling snow and ice violently against the windowpanes. you might think they were whirlwinds of salt and the moans of a child, and tears blur my eyes when I think about how I've spent my life: I didn't realize how quickly I was in the process of losing everything; I didn't understand that every day that doesn't seem like much is one small cog in the great mechanism of universal loss." (pg. 122)

Book 12

http://www.amazon.com/Mercury-Under-My-Tongue-Novel/dp/1933368969

Cold Mountain: A Novel

By Charles Frazier

This is loosely a civil war book, but it really has the civil war as the back drop with this beautifully written, surprising, simple story right on top of that bleak context. The writing was absolutely unique and compelling. Often the language itself truly delighting me to where I laughed out loud or thought about some sentence for days.

In a strange way I felt this more as a love story. Between the main characters but also between each of them and the land, Cold Mountain. And woven in between was a story about the love of books. Next to the exploration of love was unearthing recovery. Recovering from war or putting it more broad, recovering from anything violent and painful. How do we stitch ourselves back together when life has exposed us to horrific and youth robbing experiences? With all naivete, all innocence gone, do we throw in the towel or fight to live anew regardless of the known loss?

"In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredricksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw." (pg. 16)

"He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn't come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the firs so often he might never make a civilian again." (pg. 180)

"When he set the bow to the new fiddle, the tone was startling in its clrity, sharp and pure, and the redundancy in the tuning led to curious and dissonant harmonic effects. The tune was slow and modal, but demanding in its rhythm and of considerable range. More than that, its melody constantly pressed upon you the somber notion that is was a passing thing, here and gone, unfixable. Yearning was its main theme." (pg. 233 - 234)

"To Ada, though, it seemed akin to a miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as a proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial." (pg. 234)

"Ada had tried to love all the year equally, with no discrimination against the greyness of winter, its smell of rotted leaves underfoot, the stillness in the woods and fields. Nevertheless, she could not get over loving autumn best, and she could not entirely overcome the sentimentality of finding poignancy in the fall of leaves, of seeing it as the conclusions to the year and therefore metaphoric, though she knew the seasons came around and around and had neither inauguration nor epilogue." (pg. 355)

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Mountain-Novel-Charles-Frazier/dp/B001O9CBQM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234919780&sr=1-2

Skeletons on the Zahara

By Dean King

I loved this book. A great entertaining, page-turning adventure/survival story of another time and place. Written with excellent story telling, I literally could not put it down. It is a true story, which when told well, like this one, makes it even more compelling for me. This is a great story about leadership, faith and compassion.

I hesitate to give you any more information . . .

But if you must know, it is a true story about a crew from the early 1800's who shipwrecked outside of the Sahara. This is their story of nearly dying a few times over and their experience of becoming slaves to desert Arabs.

Everything about the story is enthralling. The details of life on a ship, life about to end, life on the desert was fascinating. Definitely a piece of the puzzle in my own quest for understanding about the human will to live and to what extremes people go to achieve that goal. And actually, of even greater interest, how some do so with great integrity and some cannot find it within them to either survive or do so with human grace and compassion.

I will add Captain Riley and Sidi Hamat to my list of heroes. Not simply for surviving but for providing leadership, compassion and humanity in that search for survival. Dean King did an excellent job of making an old story come to life.

Salem alikoom.

(book 10)

Deadly Little Secret

By Laurie Faria Stolarz

This is a book categorized as teen fiction, a genre I am interested in since reading the book Twilight written by Stephanie Meyers (ok I will confess I read the entire series (twice) in 2008) and The Hunger Game written by Suzanne Collins (a Stephanie Meyers recommendation).

Deadly Little Secret was not at all the cailbur of the above mentioned books, but an interesting little story about a girl who almost gets hit by a car. The reading flowed well (I read it in one sitting) and the main character was of interest but there was nothing surprising about the book. I am sure there are a million stories about a girl in school who almost gets hits by a car and falls for her lab partner but still there were some shadowing of Twilight that I thought kind of lacked creativity.

I probably would have stopped reading and put it down if it hadn't been for the question driving the entire interest in the book: who was stalking her?

Sometimes you just have to know!

*Book number 9

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer

This author is the husband of the woman who wrote The History of Love (previously posted).

This is a beautiful, mysterious, heartbreaking story of a boy looking for his father whom he adores. I don't want to say too much about the story itself, if you read it anything I tell you would ruin it for you!

I will provide an excerpt - a conversation between father and son:

"When Dad was tucking me in that night, the night before the worst day, I asked if the world was a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. 'Excuse me?' "It's just that why does the earth stay in place instead of falling through the universe?' "Is this Oskar I'm tucking in? Has an alien stolen his brain for experimentation?' I said, ' We don't believe in aliens.' He said, 'The earth does fall through the universe. You know that, buddy. It's constantly falling toward the sun. That's what it means to orbit.' So I said, ' Obviously, but why is there gravity?' He said, "What do you mean why is there gravity?' 'What's the reason?' "Who said there had to be a reason' 'No one did, exactly.' 'My question was rhetorical.' 'What's that mean?' 'It means I wasn't asking it for an answer, but to make a point.' 'What point?' 'That there doesn't have to be a reason.' 'But if there isn't a reason, then why does the universe exist at all?' 'Because of sympatetic conditions.' 'So then why am I your son?' 'Because Mom and I made love, and one of my sperm fertilied one of her eggs.' 'Excuse me while I regurgitate.' 'Don't act your age.' 'Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why?' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'We exist because we exist.' 'What the?' 'We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.'

I undertood what he meant, and I didn't disagree with him, but I didn't agree with him eaither. Just because you're an athiest, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are here." (pg 12 - 13)

http://www.amazon.com/Extremely-Incredibly-Close-Jonathan-Safran/dp/0618329706

The War Behind Me

The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About US War Crimes
Written by Deborah Nelson

Recommended by New York Times Book Review

I am in general a book behind on this blog. Even though it was a week or so ago that I was reading this book I remember closing it and crying almost every night.

A number of years ago I remember a conversation between my Aunt Beth, Uncle Dan, Robert (his son) and I believe Stephanie. We were talking about the US history of torture. This book provides documentation of what Robert and I were arguing: the Iraq war is not the first example of America using torture. Rather, torture has been common in modern American war fare (post WWII as far as I have read) and throughout the 80's we were even teaching other countries how to use these tactics (at The School of the Americas where El Salvadorean and Guatemalan, among other, militaries learned specifically how to torture). It was through my experiences in these countries and reading about them at the end of high school and throughout college that I became aware of these realities.

I think this is a very difficult concept for us to grasping like meaningless torture.(1) But this is simply, in my opinion, a communal self-delusion. And a good one to explore next to Bacavich's "American exceptionalism." How can we fully understand who we are as Americans if we do not utilize all the facts about our history, no matter how difficult some of them are to accept?

The War Behind Me is a fairly brutal read, not because of the lack of skill of the writer but simply because of the content of what she writes about and the reality she is unearthing. The soldiers who recount the massacres and desecrations(2) they witnessed have had to suffer with these memories for years and years. On top of that, they filed official reports which they believed in good faith would be acted upon. But they were not. And if they went public the military turned their back on them, accusing them of instability or spinning their complaint as a poor performing soldier with a chip on their shoulder. Most of this book is official, documented military reports with pages and pages of narrative from soldiers who believed if the higher ranking officers knew what was going on they would put a stop to it as any decent American would do.

The underlying conditions which seemed to breed torture: the use and obvious abuse of fire- free zones and the notorious obsession with body count during the Vietnam war.

This is an excerpt from one soldiers letters. I quote it here verbatim:
"I read last week where we hung some Japan general after world war 2, not for killing people, but for failing to prevent his men from killing people, civilians and such. Well, Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by pushing the body count so hard, we were 'told' to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay, and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy . . . In case you don't think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120 - 150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year."

"You have to forgive me, but I have a reservation about blaming soldiers who are told to do something, and they let it get out of hand. I believe the chain of command should be disciplined and curbed. I don't think they [army leaders] did that."

The stories were horrific, one after another. Not only from the perspective of the soldiers but from villagers who lost parents, siblings, aunts, children. I believe if we do not honestly address with our eyes wide open things like this within our history we will just keep repeating it.

1. I hate to use a phrase like this without some explanation. I do not believe there is meaningful torture. But post Abu Gharib and the entry of torture into American public discourse you really have to discern between torture as understood by an intellectual argument about how many lives you could save if you torture just the right person at just the right time and extract information that saves lives and torture as experienced by the one being tortured, the majority of the time without saving any lives.

2. Ears cut off and saved as souvenirs, field operated phones electrical lines attached to suspects genitals, water torture . . . I will stop the list there.