Confession: I haven’t ever finished reading the Harry Potter books.
I burned through the first four books ages ago, before the movies started coming out. For some reason – and I honestly can’t explain why – I made it about a chapter into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and just… stopped. There was no real reason for stopping, I just set the book down and didn’t pick it back up.
As the movies trundled on, I kept trying to convince myself to go finish the series before the movies caught up to me. Upon that failing, I convinced myself that it would be more interesting to watch the movies without any prior knowledge of the story, to form a different opinion than 90% of the people watching.
Yeah, it was just an excuse.
So, I saw Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows without having finished the books. I liked them. Alfonso Cuaron’s direction set the perfect tone for the series, and Order of the Phoenix is still my favorite of the movies, without question.
Last week, I decided to finally go back and start reading the series again. Not from scratch, but starting where I left of, with Order of the Phoenix. Holy hell, is it rough going.
Let me say that there’s nothing really wrong with the book. By this point Rowling had hit her stride and become an infinitely better writer than when she started, and the tone of the books had become decidedly more adult as the series went on. Not quite as dark as Cuaron made them, mind you, but not as ‘kiddie’ as the first couple of books.
Having seen the movie version, though, the book just feels like a drag. Things that I may have been upset at having been trimmed out in a movie adaptation now feel like extra baggage – like a plodding director’s cut that never should’ve seen the light of day. I’m only about a quarter through the book and I feel like I should be much deeper into it, with as much as I’ve been reading.
I never anticipated that seeing the movies prior to reading the books would’ve caused so much difficulty with my attempt to finish the series. Here I am, though, feeling as though a perfectly good book is going to be a chore to finish, dumping a book that I know I would’ve liked before into the same category of dreadful slogs as The Sword of Shannara and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
Okay, not nearly that bad. This book I’ll actually finish.
