Harry Potter: That Which Shall Not Be Read

3 min read

Deviation Actions

SlingBlade87's avatar
By
Published:
678 Views
No, this is not a declaration of hate against Harry Potter.

Rather, it is an explanation for something involving such.

When Harry Potter was first published back in 1997, my mother had been struggling with cancer for three years and was in the hospital a lot at that time. My dad had begun to read Harry Potter and decided to share it with her while she was in the hospital. When she came home, he continued reading it to her each night before going to sleep.

My sisters and I of course loved our parents reading to us, so, not to be left out, we'd congregate in our parents' room each night and listen in as my dad recounted with his various accents and inflections the stories of Harry and company.

We read the whole way up to the Goblet of Fire like this, as each book came out, we'd get together and read. Reading other books such as Marry Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the Narnia series, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes, and Mark Twain's various novels in the interim while we waited for the next book.

We got four copies of each book. One for our parents, and one each for myself and my sisters to read to our eventual children.

Unfortunately, my mother passed away in 2002, finally succumbing to breast cancer after first being diagnosed with it in 1994 and we stopped reading Harry Potter thereafter.

When Order of the Phoenix came out the following year, none of us wanted to read it and we didn't. It took until the Half-Blood Prince to come out two years after that for us to read again. We gathered in our parents' room, leaving a spot open for mom where she'd always lain while listening to dad read and he read the Goblet of Fire, and after finishing that he read Half-Blood Prince.

Thereafter, we got four copies of the books yet again, and finished the series when the final book came out (by this point I was in college), gathered once again in my parents' room as we finished the book and put it on the shelf with the other books in the series.

I do not know about my sisters, but my dad and I have never gone back to the series again after that. It's almost as if there was a certain finality to the series when it all came to a close, that it truly was the end of it and a final goodbye to mom.

Ignoring the fact that I started to lose interest in the series once it started getting darker and less humorous, I don't think I could ever read the series again...unless my youngest siblings (16 years younger than me) asked me to read it to them.
© 2014 - 2024 SlingBlade87
Comments24
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In