Day 3 -- Chamber of Secrets

Location: Book 3, page 40
Pages read: 690/4100, 3410 to go.

Technically, this is the post you should have seen yesterday, but I was at Cedar Point all day. I'm still a little behind. At this point I need to read ~228 pages a day. I've started Prisoner, but nothing interesting to report yet on that one.

Overall: Chamber got much better toward the end! Still my least favorite to read, but the end is very very interesting, now that we've seen stuff with Horcruxes. And I just love the happy ending stuff. Lots to discuss today. The cool stuff on Horcruxes is toward the bottom if you want to skip to that. ;)

Interesting tidbits on characters:

• We hear Harry’s signature spell, Expelliarmus, for the first time. This spell saves Harry in Book 4 and is the final spell he uses on Voldemort in book 7, and guess who taught it to him? Snape. That Snape…Always saving Harry’s butt.
• When Harry goes to Dumbledore’s office for the first time: “Harry waited nervously while Dumbledore considered him, the tips of his long fingers together.” Then he hides a bunch of stuff from him. Harry doesn’t feel comfortable with him yet. At the end of the book, talking to Dumbles: “and Harry sat, feeling unaccountably nervous.” Still nervous, but starts to open up. It’s cool to see their relationship develop.
• How anyone ever thought Harry and Hermione would get together, I don’t know. After discovering Hermione is keeping a get-well card from Lockhart under her pillow and leaving with Harry, Ron says: “Is Lockhart the smarmiest bloke you’ve ever met, or what?” It was always going to be Hermy and Won-won. :P
• It interested me greatly that the only reason Tom Riddle frames Hagrid and stops attacking people is because Prof. Dippet suggests that, maybe, he’ll get to stay at Hogwarts over the summer if the attacks stop. He hates the orphanage and loves his home at Hogwarts so much that he’s willing to stop doing what he loves – killing people – to stay at Hogwarts. This *almost* humanizes him. Not quite. xD
• Trio-dynamic! Hermione does the thinking and problem-solving. Harry is the brave one who goes and confronts things. Ron…assists...? He seems pointless sometimes, but I thought of something about his role – he’s the connection to the magical world. The other two come from non-magical backgrounds, but he’s cultured in wizardry, so he brings things to the table that the others can’t.

 Cool stuff on Horcruxes. SPOILERS APLENTY!

• Tom Riddle, talking about growing powerful: “Powerful enough to start feeding Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her…” This *obviously* suggests that part of Voldy’s soul is contained in the diary. Re-reading it is funny because you see all of these obvious hints and go, DUH!
• About Harry being a Horcrux: Harry feels a connection to the diary – Tom Riddle seems like a half-forgotten friend, and he keeps picking it up and flipping through it for no reason. So there seems to be a connection between horcruxes, even if they’re separate pieces of soul. Harry and the diary is our first taste of this. More examples: Voldy has a special connection to Nagini, and Harry often sees into Voldemorts thoughts – Voldy eventually uses this to put thoughts into Harry’s head; Harry even has a dream from Nagini's perspective. ALSO, Talking to Dumbledore: ‘”Voldemort put a bit of himself in me?’ Harry said, thunderstruck. ‘It certainly seems so.’” So, once we knew about Horcruxes, shouldn’t we have known that Harry was a horcrux?? I believed that he was, but a lot of people were trying to deny it. The hints were there, people!
• When Tom asks Harry how he escaped from Voldemort as a baby, we get this description: “There was an odd red gleam in his hungry eyes now.” We get this same description time after time in the 6^th book, when we see memories of Tom Riddle. The first time I saw it in book 6, I noticed it was usually around objects that he wanted to turn into Horcruxes, so I thought it was part of that magic... But it just seems to come up when he really wants something. I guess it’s a result of being less human after creating Horcruxes.
• Lucius Malfoy seems to end up with the diary. I’m going to have to pay attention in book 6 to see if Dumbledore has it, because if he does, it would appear to be an error. I know he has it in the 6^th movie…stupid movies! :P

 Found 2 typos in my edition of this. p283: “Professorr”. p321: “Fawke’s”. :P

To Azkaban!

Day 2 -- Chamber of Secrets

Location: Book 2, pg. 186
Pages read: 495/4100; 3605 to go.

Soooo I'm about a day behind...didn't get as much done yesterday as I wanted. I'll finish book 2 this evening, but as I'm a little over halfway through, I thought I'd post some stuff I've noticed.

Overall: Prolly my least favorite of the series to re-read. It's not necessarily the worst book... but reading it is a struggle (or, as much of a struggle as reading HP can be. So it's still pretty enjoyable xD). Here's why:

• It is EERILY similar to the movie. The Sorcerer's Stone movie matched the book pretty well, but this one is just NUTS. Almost all of the dialogue is verbatim from the book (the Cornish Pixies scene is what made me notice it -- it's EXACTLY the same), so I'm just hearing it in the actors' voices. Pretty much nothing is left out of the movie... the only different thing so far has been Nick's Deathday party, which is fun. One of my favorite things about rereading the series is noticing all the things that are left out of the movies, but with this one, there's not much at all. No wonder CoS is the longest of the movies.
• It's fraught with re-introductions of characters and concepts that were introduced in book one (i.e. Harry's past, how Quidditch works, how the houses and the house cup work...). This was fun to read in Sorcerer's Stone, because it reminded you of things you hadn't read about in a while, but now they're just re-introducing things I already knew about...bleh.
• It's very similar in style and flow to the first book. The first and the second are essentially mystery novels, which is cool -- the little hints are fun to notice throughout (Quirrell hints in the 1st, Ginny and Myrtle hints in this one) -- but the flow of the plot is just so similar to the first one. This is probably why the 3rd one is always so refreshing -- it's a change of pace.

That's not to say that it lacks fun stuff to talk about...

• More werewolf discrimination stuff...In Lockhart's class, he forces Harry to help him reenact his encounter with a werewolf and how he defeated it. Ironically, he's going to be fired and replaced with a werewolf.
• This one seems to foreshadow book 6 a lot. When in Borgin and Burkes, Draco is poking around and sees the opal necklace he later tries to kill Dumbledore with. Also -- this blew my MIND, but I was disappointed to discover that Josh and Dawn already knew about it xD -- the vanishing cabinet that Draco has to repair in the sixth one! It breaks in this one! Nearly-Headless Nick makes Peeves break it over Filch's office so Harry doesn't get in trouble. Filch: "'That vanishing cabinet was extremely valuable!' he was saying gleefully to Mrs. Norris. 'We'll have Peeves out this time, my sweet --'". I had never noticed that before. 6 or 7 years before book 6, Jo already had stuff planned, and she set up for it here and there in book 2.
• More Legilimency! Snape accuses Harry of being "not entirely truthful" at the scene of the Chamber message: "Dumbledore was giving Harry a searching look. His twinkling light-blue gaze made Harry feel as though he were being X-rayed."
• FAVORITE LINE SO FAR: "Harry," said Hagrid abruptly as though struck by a sudden thought. "Gotta bone ter pick with yeh. I've heard you've bin givin' out signed photos. How come I haven't got one?" Makes me laugh every time. xD

This post wasn't super interesting...but I think the next one will be. Lots of fun Horcrux stuff to discuss at the end of book 2, which I'll be finishing tonight.

I like comments!!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Wow... I had forgotten how great these books are. What a genius. 

Note that this contains a lot of spoilers. For the true nerds, I list some discrepancies at the bottom for y'all to debate. I'd like to see what you all think. xD

Overall thoughts: I found I lot of foreshadowing/parallels between this book and later books -- recurring themes, little hints, etc. Awesome to see them, having read the whole thing. The characters in this book capture the imagination right away -- i.e., in the first chapter, we see an old gray wizard, a woman who turns into a cat, and a giant on a motorcycle -- but they turn out to be such deep, dynamic characters, as we find out over the course of 4100 rich pages. The light-hearted magic stuff + deep, dark mysteries, scary stuff, serious characters = it truly appeals to all ages.

For the nerds among us, here are some observations.

• Christmas festivities. "Dumbledore had swapped his pointed wizard’s hat for a flowered bonnet…” 'Nuff said. Jo knew from the beginning about Dumbledore's orientation. :P
• When they go into the forest, their primary fear is werewolves -- eventually, we befriend a werewolf. Funny how Jo sets that up so we can see how much discrimination and ignorance there is about werewolves in the wizarding world.
• FAVORITE LINE IN THE BOOK. After Dumbles tells Harry that his mom died to save him, and that that's why Quirrellmort couldn't touch him: “Dumbledore now became very interested in a bird out on the windowsill, which gave Harry time to dry his eyes on the sheet.” AWW. xD

Here's some foreshadowing I found.

• Hagrid: “Gringotts is the safest place in the world fer anything yeh want ter keep safe – ‘cept maybe Hogwarts.” Sooo, after the 6^th book came out, and we were all like, WHERE ARE THE HORCRUXES GONNA BE?? Well, Jo told us. In the first book. There was one in Gringotts, and one in Hogwarts.
•  On Legilimency... Harry, about Snape: “…yet he sometimes had the horrible feeling that Snape could read minds.” Good instincts, Harry. Also, we know that for Legilimency to be strongest, eye-contact is important. Well, when Harry lies about having the stone, the turbaned-Voldy knows he’s lying. That’s when he requests to see Harry *face-to-face*. Only once they’re looking at each other does Voldy know that it’s in Harry’s pocket. x)
• The way unicorn blood works foreshadows the way horcruxes work, IMO. You have to kill something in order to keep living, but you life a “half life, a cursed life.
• Their adventure through the trapdoor TOTALLY foreshadows their adventure killing horcruxes. Harry initially wanted to go alone...but each of them has different skills so that, without the group effort, they would never have made it through. Each of them takes on different rooms – Herm gets the devil’s snare and the potions riddle, Ron gets chess, Harry gets the flying keys and of course, Quirrellmort. In the 7^th book, each horcrux is killed by a different character. There are 7 challenges, the last being Voldemort. Interesting difference – in this book, the reason Harry wins is because of his mom’s love-protection, and because Dumbledore ends up saving him. At the end of the 7^th though, Harry’s two main protections – Lily and Dumbles – are gone, and Harry has to confront voldy bravely on his own. Love it.

DISCREPANCIES!! Maybe they're not, but I'd like to see what people have to say about these.

• FLYING. So confused. Harry asks Hagrid how he got to the hut on the sea, and he says, “Flew.” My first thought was that Harry misinterpreted Hagrid’s saying “Floo,” then I thought maybe he had used a thestral. But Hagrid goes on to say the reason he can’t do it again is because he’s not allowed to use magic now that he’s picked up Harry. That implies that Hagrid used magic to fly….but when Voldy does that in Book 7, it’s a HUGE DEAL. Thoughts?? (BTW – Dumbledore says he “flies” to London later in the book – I think it’s safe to assume he was on a Thestral, because I think Hagrid says in book 5 or 6 that Dumbles likes to use thestrals from time to time.)
• The kitchens. Harry sees a suit of armor and says: “There was a suit of armor near the kitchens, he knew, but he must be five floors above there.” I didn’t think Harry knew where the kitchens were until book 4. :P
• Dumbledore seems to get Snape’s motives slightly wrong. He says Snape saved Harry because he wanted to get even with James…but we now kinda know that it’s because he loves Lily. We also know that James saving Snape’s life isn’t the only reason why Snape hates James and Harry…it's also because he loved Lily. So either Dumbles doesn’t fully know Snape’s motive yet, or he’s keeping that bit from Harry.

 Love these books. Much more to come. On to Chamber of Secrets!