Tuesday, July 11, 2017

'S Prose, Not Superheroes: Recently Read Real Books

I'm going through my second childhood--only this time, I'm reading prose fiction instead of wasting my time with dumbed-down ol' comic books!

Here's a snooty selection of what I've read over the past year or so, in no apparent order:

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling--I read all seven books and watched all eight DVDs in eight weeks in the summer of 2015. I'm a late adopter--having worked at Border's in the early 2000s and probably handled (conservatively) some 10,000 individual copies of the various HP editions through the end of 2005 as a part-time bookseller. I never read a single sentence at the time, being exclusively interested in non-fiction (which lead to me returning to college for a decade-long stint). But I've read pp. 317-421 of The Prisoner of Azkaban (the Shrieking Shack sequence) a total of eight times--it's the most brilliantly orchestrated piece of storytelling I am aware of in any media.