Literature: The New Crack!

Hi, my name is Will, and I, uh, *looks down* I liked the Harry Potter books.
All of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I always highly respected J.K. Rowling and what she did; she got millions upon millions of children excited and eager to read.
I really don’t think that I have a higher pedestal to put her on. What she has done is nothing short of amazing.

I’ve always been a reader. Not so much of a good writer, but a voracious reader. Started early, and always loved it.
In 8th grade, when all my classmates were groaning about reading 20 pages that night for english class, I was putting down ~1000 page novels in a week, in addition to my workload.

Granted, I do insert the work “fuck” and other niceties into nearly every third word if I speak aloud, but I like to write that off as, uh, colloquialisms, bitch.
Anyway, I have found that there are numerous distinct advantages to being a young reader: spelling, vocabulary, grammar, etc…

Er, got a little side-tracked. Kinda.
Anyways, I never read thses books because in my opinion, they are children’s books and well below my reading level.
Well, I found this assumption to be pleasantly true. Yes they’re easy reads, but it’s as though she is tricking the kids into learning.
Because this is a fictional land of magic, she has free roam of the English language, and its parent, Latin.
With a spell like Lumos, you and I already have a good idea of what this does.
Through reading this spell, and seeing it’s consequeces, the kids recognize the Latin base of this word, they can now recognize words like Illuminate and Luminous and understand that they have to do with light.
These books are almost like a fun SAT English Prep Course.

And, as you progress through the series, not only do the books get thicker, the plots become a more intricate, and the characters mature.
And since it seems as though she has put one out a year, and the each book spans one schoolyear at the magic school, the kids reading these books have also aged a year. Helps them to identify.
Each year, there are a boatload of nervous new kids. Our main characters and now flustering, angsty teenagers, and she catches the mix of emotions quite well. She’s almost writing in realtime.

Anyways, all benefits aside, I found the books enjoyable, quick reads.
And I find that I have learned something from these books too: You’re never to old to enjoy “children’s books”.