The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

The final act of  The Deathly Hallows  really is a shift for the entire book series. There's an apocalyptic intensity to the Battle of Hogwarts with beloved characters that are occasionally killed with little more than a passing line of text. It's a numbing experience in some ways, emotionally, and certainly unrelenting. But, through it all, Harry himself remains steadfast and constant. That's both the strength and tragedy inherent to the scarred protagonist: To garner a reputation as The Boy Who Lived means that said boy has to be surrounded by death. I think the reason why something like  Harry Potter  could only really come from the United Kingdom is how it was never really afraid to lean into the macabre and not in that try-too-hard Tim Burton kind of way. There's something distinctly British about that, the frankness about discussing death that is often a relatively uncomfortable topic in American discourse. The real underlying theme to the  Harry Potter  franc

The final Harry Potter novel came out approximately a month before my 21st birthday. I was visiting a friend in Raleigh when it came out in July 2007, freshly back from a study abroad trip in Costa Rica. The cool thing (?) about the South is that a lot of those Wal-Marts are open for 24 hours so, rather than wait outside a Barnes & Noble, I just swung by a Wal-Mart at midnight and pick up a copy relatively hassle-free. I was only on this particular North Carolina trip for a couple days after that, stopping by my college on the drive home to officially move in to my first apartment but, by the time I reached Newport News, I had completely finished reading The Deathly Hallows from cover-to-cover. I think that's a testament to the story; there's a strong argument that the final Harry Potter novel is the very best in the entire series. The first half of the novel, which would get adapted into its own individual film by David Yates, is part-road fiction, and part being-on-

By the end of The Order of the Phoenix , the battle lines between Voldemort and his Death Eaters against the rest of the wizarding world had been firmly set. His return now public and Harry beginning what would become his final year at Hogwarts, The Half-Blood Prince is a final bit of setup and a final bit of housecleaning before the grand finale. There are loose ends Rowling needed to tend to before the seventh and final novel in the series and this book suffers a bit because of it, laying the foundation for something bigger in sacrifice of its own self-contained story. But at least she turns most of her cards. The sixth installment of the Harry Potter series was published that last magical summer in between high school and college for me, that kind of lazily surreal period where you've just completed that lengthy major stage of your teen years and make final preparations to go off on your own academic adventure hopefully somewhere new and with its own new cast of characters

I remember reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the first time back in high school, incredulous that the Ministry of Magic would try to keep something as devastating as the return of Voldemort so vehemently under wraps. Given the state of affairs these days, from the suppression of the truth to malicious leadership, it actually seems pretty par for the course if a bit restrained. That's a whole other thing; let's dig into the text and the film. Order of the Phoenix explores consequence, more specifically the consequences left from The Goblet of Fire 's earth-shattering climax. Harry is suffering from PTSD after watching Cedric Diggory killed before his eyes. His father's old allies are scrambling to reorganize and they're doing it working against the wishes of the Ministry who install a puppet headmistress at Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge, one of the most effectively reviled literary antagonists in modern fiction. And the Death Eaters are still o

We never see the things that hit us the hardest coming. That's a big reason why those incidents are so profound, so cataclysmic. The fourth installment of the Harry Potter series completely hinges on that axiom. It's also the first book in the series that's so expansive that it's larger than most bricks when it's in print. The Goblet of Fire starts and continues this narrative of celebration for the majority of the story; there's a World Cup that opens the tale, a tournament bringing three schools and their students together in the name of amazing feats of wizardry and witchcraft, and even a big school dance with a live band. Everyone is having a good time...until they're not. Life comes at you fast. But it can never quite outrace inevitability. Keep holding that golden egg, pal. You have no idea what's coming next. It varies, of course, but high school can be a hell of a lot of fun; I certainly had a lot of it. Goblet of Fire embraces that youth

By the third book, the Harry Potter series had one last major bit of foundation setting before it fully turn its focus to its underlying central conflict: What exactly were the circumstances behind the deaths of Lily and James Potter? The Prisoner of Azkaban is about Harry exploring this question and, like all major expeditions of self-discovery and soul-searching, he will have to do it alone. True to its title, there's a prison break at the notorious Azkaban and the man that allegedly betrayed Harry's parents, Sirius Black, has escaped. Learning about this, Harry is intent to track him down and kill him for his betrayal but he's sidelined because of the security risk while all his friends are able to visit the nearby Hogsmeade. Grief is one of those things that will always set people apart from their peers, from their friends. Harry has to deal with a physical separation too and it couldn't come at a worse possible time. Fortunately, he's just been introduc

I remember the second Harry Potter novel maybe leaned into the more macabre and sinister elements that its setting provided more than any other installment. This is a school where it's basically Halloween all year round and the students get to literally party with ghosts and other things that traditionally go bump in the night. And if the majority of Harry Potter novels have an air of mystery to them, The Chamber of Secrets is paced like a whodunnit with the characters getting picked off one-by-one as the core trio scramble to find the culprit in a plot that conveniently doesn't near fruition until the end of the school year. As someone that grew up reading Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle with a childhood foundation of horror movies, this all was a perfectly blended literary cocktail. Outside of Dobby, Chamber of Secrets is a complete improvement over its predecessor at least in terms of the novel. Something is stalking through the halls of the school petrifying

Hi. It's been awhile, hasn't it? Thought I'd shake the rust off and revisit the blog a bit. After all, there's a new movie coming out and it's the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise. Like many people my relative age, that series has meant a lot to me so what I'll try to do here leading up to the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is write up something that focuses on the movies while reflecting on the original source material they're based off of. And it all starts here. In elementary school, we would have book fairs twice a year, once in the autumn and once in the spring. It always something I greatly looked forward to; my mom would give me a little extra lunch money whenever the book fair was in town and I would use it accordingly. Towards the tail end of elementary school, the first three Harry Potter books were published in the United States and I tore through them like wildfire, this prodigious blend of coming-of