Know Your Harry Potter


I would so like hope my daughter to develop the reading habit. So far though, no luck. She’s 8 now, and the only time she’ll read is in the school bus if her friends are reading on the bus too.

Ages back, I’d heard of some parents who used to read the Harry Potter books to their kids, and remember thinking, “Really? Who would read such a big book aloud?”. But now, in desperation, I decided to give it a shot.

She found the first 3 books very interesting. The stories weren’t predictable. Friends fought with each other and made up. Mean kids didn’t always get their comeuppance. Adults didn’t believe Harry because hey, he was just a kid. And the details of the Harry Potter universe, from muggles to mudbloods to house elves to squibs was fascinating. The book would raise many questions and answer them only at the end. And there were always questions that didn’t get answered at all. All this was a new experience for her, a different type of book, a fascinating world of its own.

Sadly, it still wasn’t enough to get her to read herself. But my reading to her allowed her to be on the I-know-Harry-Potter side of the aisle among her friends, just in the nick of time. Consider the fate of the one kid in her group who didn’t know Harry Potter. Suffice to say, that kid was mercilessly ribbed as the ignorant one in the group.

In desperation, that friend on the wrong side of the aisle tried faking it, saying she now knew the stories. Smelling something fishy, the rest of them (my daughter included) pounced on that kid, quizzing her with questions about the not-so-famous characters and triumphantly “proved” she hadn’t read the books. That poor kid asked her parents to buy the book, but seeing the size of the book, they realized she’d never read it. And unlike me, they had no intention of reading it to the kid themselves. So they bought the abridged version, which had a few pictures thrown in. Bad choice. The kid was mercilessly ribbed saying she was reading the baby version: the “real” Harry Potter books didn’t have any pictures.

I guess while my reading-t0-her hasn’t turned her into a reader yet, I inadvertently saved her from the fate of that other kid.

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