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Dear readers, there are some sacrifices I think are worth it as a readerly parent.  Examples include: making a Link costume for literacy night with two days notice, in the middle of the week (read: not enough time for Amazon Prime to save me from a couple of late crafting nights), listening to SO. MUCH. Pokemon talk, and always needing to have an audiobook ready for any car ride over 10 minutes (and some less).  I could go on, but I won’t.  What I will say is recently (in the last two years), I’ve reread some of my childhood favorites and even shared some of them with my children.  B wasn’t into Tuck Everlasting (and I didn’t love it as much on reread, but we both enjoyed The Search for Delicious), but he’s gotten much further than I expected in Alanna: The First Adventure (because yes I did have to answer questions from my 8 year old about why pubescent Alanna woke up bleeding and the healer replied with a cup of tea).  I read the first two books in The Song of the Lioness Quartet maybe in middle school, then reread those and finished the quartet in 2017 (and then promptly consumed The Immortals, Protector of the Small, and Daughter of the Lioness within the year).  Perhaps it was the mostly new material, but I adored them so much that I bought a box set of the original quartet to help me finish reading it faster and to loan out (plus any other Pierce’s other titles I could find on sale on Kindle).  See also, Dear Tamora Pierce, please can we have more Numair?  Pretty please!!  With love, Me!

As further generations read, watch, and become obsessed with all things Harry Potter, my house, and my children are not immune.  Parents have different ways of handling this, perhaps reading a book a year until they’re done, perhaps a book then the movie, or perhaps a free for all until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is done.  This last one was how things went with the eldest at my house because, well, that book goes darker than the first three, but also, if you, dear child, can handle The Last Olympian, then you can handle Goblet of Fire, but maybe we should read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix together.  So here we are.  He finished Goblet of Fire in 2019 and I was supposed to read it when Ashley and I had Kindle Unlimited last winter, and didn’t.  Now we are nearing the end of month four of this round of Kindle Unlimited, and I’m still working on it (64%).  (And he may or may not have put my Kindle in my hands multiple times in the last week and asked me to read Goblet of Fire.  Yes, I’m that mom, he’s the only one in the house who doesn’t know it’s in progress.)  Y’all IT IS SO LONG.  Also, I WANT TO READ ALL THE THINGS.  Also, while I’m enjoying the experience, I’m not enjoying it as much as others.  By others I mean, those my husband’s librarian friend refers to when she says “Millennials need to read a different book. If you’ve read the same book seven times, you’re not a reader.”  While she’s not wrong, it’s more nuanced than that.  If you only read one book or series every year, are you really a reader?  It’s debatable.  If you reread a series every year among your 100+ titles, then maybe you just really love it.  Also, we’re both millennials here, albeit older ones, and this is my first reread, 13 to 20 years after the initial read, so I think I, at least, am safe on this one.  I’m curious dear readers, what do you think of this?  

I have to confess, my reread of Harry Potter (1-4 pick one, it’s the same) is underwhelming, which is contributing to it taking so long.  Let’s discuss the first (and only) time I’ve read the Harry Potter series.  It was the summer of 2000 and I was at the library searching for something fun to reward myself with each time I finished a summer reading book for AP US History.  A close friend of the blog was working there and put the series in my hands, or books one through three because that is all that was out, then I found #4 when I and it were ready.  IT WAS PERFECTION, THANK YOU S!  Fast forward to 2005 when Half-Blood Prince was coming out and my boss is upset that I’ve never read Order of the Phoenix (because school interfered something fierce with my reading life).  He brought me his copy, attended the midnight distribution for Half-Blood Prince, and then loaned me that copy too (you’re the best B!).  Naturally, I promptly consumed both, despite my summer classes.  Fast forward to 2007 when Deathly Hallows came out.  Another friend pre-ordered a copy, read it, passed it to a friend, who passed it to me as I was driving through town on the way to a trivia team-building trip at the beach (yes, because that’s how we rolled, both of us, and it reminds us of several stories actually) and I spent the better part of the first two days with that book here or there or anywhere I could be.  I don’t remember a lot about the experience of reading the first four for the first time, but I do remember they were a breath of fresh air (and what wouldn’t be after reading Since Yesterday or The Fifties).  I remember the latter three being a consuming, glorious experience.  I hope the same will be true for the reread.  Only time will tell.

One would think an enjoyable book would still be enjoyable 20 years later, and they have been fine so far.  I enjoyed reading the Percy Jackson books a lot more last spring/summer (and then I was trying to keep up because I knew they were a high content level for my then seven year old and I wanted to be able to chat with him about the story and themes).  Maybe I’m overly familiar with Harry Potter  from seeing the movies so much (thank you ABC Family), but we haven’t even had cable in seven years, so even that has been a while.  I really enjoyed reading Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (as did my 8 year old, after he got over the format) and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but something about the original Harry just isn’t landing as well as I’d hoped now, and I don’t like it.  Looking back, what I wish I might have considered is reading them in between all the challenging titles I’ve been digging into recently.  That’s how I got into the series in the first place, so maybe they would have landed better that way.  

I’m going to work to wrap up Goblet of Fire this week and maybe get through Order of the Phoenix this month too (especially as I put a hard copy on hold at the library for my child and will pick it up on Friday).  We’ll see about the last two, especially with school about to start up again (*facepalm*) and two book clubs coming up in the next few weeks.  

Speaking of book clubs, please do join us for:

• Virtual Book Club to discuss The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray on Friday, August 7!   Registration is open here.
• We’re joining ReadaBookwithKara to read and discuss Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.   You can check out the details here, put the August 1 livestream discussion on your calendar, and then read some of Kara’s work here.   

~Nikki

If you’ve met me, then you know I’m all about that #SlytherinLife. I married one, too, even though he refuses to read the books or watch the movies, he did take the sorting hat quiz on the Wizarding World website before there was a sign in requirement.  We’re ambitious, not just a little bit cunning, loyal, prideful, and skew to the traditional side. Not once have I deluded myself into thinking that I could have been in Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff. A Slytherin knows themselves.

This Slytherin, she knows that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in all its imaginative glory, is worth every re-read (as she admits in her H.W.B. bio that every summer a new book came out she re-read all of them again), putting a toe into the ridiculous world of Harry Potter fan-fic (Drarry anyone?) is worth the rabbit holes, and that sharing the life-altering fandom with the next generation (no matter the public short-comings of the author) is worth the thrill, wonder, and magic. Besides this current re-read with Nikki and her eldest little, I’ve been on a movie watch with Carla, my Ravenclaw partner-in-crime to Universal Studios and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in L.A., with her eldest little. Other friends and I discuss when their littles are older at what age we will be introducing them into the fandom via the books and all the major plans of taking them to Orlando for their first Wizarding World experience. (Thanks KR and ET for the girl talk in the new house last week and bemoaning how nothing compares to midnight book release parties!) 

This re-read has been the first I’ve ever done on Kindle. I am thoroughly enjoying being able to highlight favorite passages (Ronald’s snark, y’all) and foreshadowing situations for what I know is coming in the later books (you have to admit, J.K. Rowling played the long game). I’m about 30% through Goblet of Fire with Nikki, but I’m not going to be like Ron and Harry completing their Divination homework and completely fudge my prediction on my completing it this week. If it happens, yay, if not, whoops. I own all of them in hardback and am not worried about my lack of access to them at the moment. (We are busy moving into our new house! Finally, I can unpack my books!) I’m not quite underwhelmed with the re-read, but it’s not my first re-read since the publication of Deathly Hallows as I pick up these books every couple of years for some comfort. I own the movies, all of them even including both Fantastic Beasts on video and book-form screenplay, and watch them often. 

Reading these books again is a comfort for me, as it is for others, because we see ourselves in the characters. We see these children, and the adults who surround them, dealing with hard, life-altering situations (dude, if Harry were a cat, he’d be on the last of his 9 lives). We see them overcoming hardship, we see them enacting the change they want to see (I love S.P.E.W. it’s one of my favorite themes in the books that are missing from the movies), they question the media (Rita Skeeter’s some ridiculousness, even though I dressed as her at a summer camp in 2005 – the summer of Half Blood Prince), and they love each other – both their friends and the humanity inherent in their enemies (that scene in the Room of Requirement with the fiendfyre). Just like with all good fiction, we learn how to treat others by modeling the best of our favorite fictional characters.

In this second half of 2020, re-read whatever you need to to get by and, in the immortal words of Ronald Bilius Weasley, I request that you “don’t let the Muggles get you down.”

~Ashley