Stranger than Fiction

This is probably the quickest update on my “20 Firsts” list so far! I am pleased to announce that I have finally finished reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, and have thus completed the entire series. This probably doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, but I have waited 4 years to actually do this! I still remember debating possible plots with Dean and Thomas in 2004, just after the sixth book in the series had been published, as we tried to figure out what J.K. Rowling had in store for Harry in the final book. While it was published in 2006, I didn’t buy a copy for a couple of months – mostly because my mother was hunting for a copy that didn’t cost R300, and since I was immersed in tons of reading for my English literature courses at the time, I didn’t even have the opportunity to read it when we eventually bought it. And so, the book has been sitting appetizingly on my shelf for the past year and a half or so, waiting to be read. I eventually gave in last December, and decided that in my 2 month long holiday, I would read the entire series, but I ran out of time – especially since I was presented with two 900 page books to read for my course (as an aside, I would just like to warn everyone never to read “Middlemarch”. It is amazing – nothing happens in it, consistently, for over 900 pages, and then it ends. I am 1 of probably 5 people in my course who have read the book, and I suspect that 3 of the other people actually only read the Sparknotes). I did manage to re-read the first 5 books, and as soon as my academic work came to an end this year, I reached for the sixth book, which I finished about a week ago, and then moved onto the final book. It has been nail-biting stuff. I must confess that if one were to walk past my room, you might also hear me exclaiming aloud, to no one in particular, as I read about the final exploits of Harry, Ron and Hermione, and, as many predicated I would, I even cried as I read the last few chapters. I finished the book about an hour ago, feeling a tad emotionally drained, as well as rather elated, and a little sad that there will be no new tales about Hogwarts, Gryffindor and Blast-Ended Skrewts.