Happy Harry Potter Day!!

I've been waiting for today for soooooo long. I'm so excited for the release party tonight and yet dreading it at the same time. How can Harry Potter come to an end? I was lying awake sick last night and I started thinking about how much I LOVE Harry Potter. They have brought so much joy and delight to my life and I just wanted to write a little blurb about my love of Harry.

I was reading an article from an English Education journal the other day that said how the past 10 years have seen an incredible rise in both the quality and quantity of Young Adult literature available now days. This being a HUGE passion of mine the past two years since I started teaching English, I eagerly researched a few things. YA lit is selling now in numbers never before seen, and the quality is better than EVER before. This can honestly be attributed in part to Rowling. Kids who started reading and loving the Harry Potter series when they were 10 have continued to read and demand high quality stories and they're buying them more than ever. Another reason for the explosion of this genre is that again, when kids read and love a 700 page Harry Potter book at age 12, what book can they not read? They can read anything! Kids feel empowered that they can read whatever they want, and they do, not always of course, but many life long readers were born w/ Harry Potter 1. I remember when I was in junior high and read Gone with the Wind. I'm pretty sure I was just about the only kid at school who'd read a book with 1000+ pages, but today, there are very few kids in a junior high school who haven't read that 800+ page Harry Potter. It's amazing.

Then of course, there's just the delight, the joy and the wonder that the Wizarding World has brought us. There are too many cool things to even start mentioning all my favorites. What an imagination that lady has. I'm so excited to see how it all ends and to have my faith in Snape proven true. :-) But I'm so sad it's ending. The past 9 years either reading, re-reading, watching, discussing, defending or anticipating either a book or a movie have been so much fun. Only a few more hours until it will be in my hands FINALLY! I'm so excited. So... just in case you were thinking of calling me or coming over or bugging me in any way over the next few days, you should probably re-think that, I will be BUSY!!!!! :-)

Happy Harry Potter Day!!!!