Potter Ponderments, one: On Rereading

Since I got home last Sunday, I read six books.

I won't, however, be posting my thoughts on them, and I don't expect to write much about the next one either.

Those lovable little leaflets, of course, are the ones that have changed pop culture forever over the last ten years.

(Did you know, all this time, I hadn't known they were only first published in 1997? I started reading The Sorcerer's Stone in fifth grade, 1998, but thought I was a lot later at coming to them, more like four or five years. Now that I think about it, I have no idea where I got this idea. Hm.)

I hadn't been planning on doing a full rereading until afterwards, but I was persuaded otherwise and rather pleased to discover that I still, in fact, possess "the 13-year-old megafan’s ability to inhale the book in a weekend" (NY Times).

It's a funny thing, rereading books. No matter how many times you've read them before, you still have that tiny sliver of hope that maybe, somehow, they'll turn out some other way. You're left just imagining the possibilities before the story's set in stone; how nice it would have been if Wormtail was killed in the Shrieking Shack and Sirius set free, or if the dementors had been prevented from kissing Barty Crouch, Jr. You know it won't happen, but it's nice to think about it anyway.

I was more conscious of than ever during my voyage of the possibility of sneaky, underhanded involvement of Dan Radcliffe, Emma Watson and all the rest. The first three books, for me, were untainted: with the exception of Mary Grandpré's illustrations (which, I might add, I'm a huge fan of), I was left to my own imagination thinking up all the characters' appearances. What surprises me, then, is that after so many years of having images of the actors who portray them ingrained into me, I can still remember those depictions. Not as clearly, maybe -- they're more like shadows, now -- but definitely enough not to imagine Rupert Grint instead of Ron Weasley (who, in my opinion, look nothing alike).

What really shocked me, though, was how incredibly little I remembered from the fifth and sixth books. I'd only read them once: the fifth, "inhaled" in the night after its release; the sixth, read at a considerably slower pace (three days) because I'd forced myself to. Neither left a very deep mark in my memory, because rereading them was almost like they were new. Sure, I remembered the big things -- the stuff you'd call spoilers -- but a lot of the time I was reading in suspense, not quite remembering what would happen next.

So that's it for now. I'm not big on plot theories, but I'll ramble a bit more before the book release. Sorry if you're, uh, not much of a Harry Potter fan.