Wednesday, July 25, 2007

against the dark lord

I.
Partner and I walked to the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue on Saturday morning and bought our copies of the last Harry Potter book. This is not nearly as thrilling as Shelley's experience getting her copy.

The weather Saturday was much cooler than the humid week preceding it, and I ended up reading the entire book, finally ending at 12:30 am.

The best way to experience these novels is on a long car drive listening to the voices of Jim Dale reading the book. His creative interpretive reading is far superior to the actors in the movie versions. The Harry Potter books were great fun to read, but I will not be reflecting about passages that I read through the series.

II.
On Sunday I started reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Woman, and was surprised at similarity in tone (emerging adolescent, in hiding). Except her book was not a fantasy or an entertainment, and the people she wrote about were real. The epilogue at the end lets us know that it did not turn out well. The dark lord of her book, Adolph Hitler, is not toppled in time to save Anne, and instead we learn that only one person from the hidden Annex survived the war, her father. The rest suffered brutal deaths in the camps.

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