I remember back when the Harry Potter books had just come out. I never read them; I didn’t do a lot of reading as a child. That would be why I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone for this past week. It’s not that I never really got into Harry Potter, after the fourth of so movie I began to go out of my way to watch those. I would say that I do enjoy that fantasy world, and that story.
Having first seen the movies, it would be impossible not to read the book from that lens. That is to say, every character or scene in the two media that are similar or similar enough would be viewed as a memory of the movie. So while reading I felt as though I was moving from clip to clip from the movie.
I didn’t finish the book, it’s bookmarked and I’d like to revisit it sometime. I found it to be sort of a casual read; it felt like a scholastic book. At the same time, though, it did have a compelling nature, but that could just be my potterhead friend’s sublime influence over me.
On another note, as it was within the discussion during the class: The Chronicles of Narnia. I had read the series before the disney movies began coming out. The books were easily better than the movies, especially Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Thank you Disney for that let down, it was one of my favorites from the series. The Horse and His Boy was perhaps my most favorite from the series. What I had liked about it the most that book was it pulled you out and away from the Narnia that you had been reading about, you were in the same world but you became exposed to a completely different story and area of the world, also the Main Four of the children where only minor characters in that. Comparing that Harry Potter where you follow the same group through seven books, back to Chronicles of Narnia where you keep meeting new characters with new stories across seven books. Two interesting approaches, I think, to each his own.
