There was a column a few weeks ago in theNew York Timesentitled, “The Harry Potter Generation needs to grow up.”
Basically, the gist of it was that the generation who grew up on the series of books that started in 1997 and made the series a multimillion-dollar franchise that spawned equally captivating movies based on each individual book had better take stock of themselves in the real world.
I thought the writer a bit harsh taking on the fantasy world of Potter, Hermione, Hogwarts and Professor Dumbledore and splashing multiple pails of very cold water on the whole multimedia juggernaut as it supposedly affected the mindset of the kids who had read them.
The column sadly tied the innocence, the dressing up , the fun of enjoying this modern-day fable and told the great majority of millennials—who for the most part were Potter’s audience and that were buying the books, seeing the movies and eventually attending the wizarding theme parks (full disclosure, I have been there, too)—that it was time to throw away your wand, your cape, and realize that the naïve, wonderful (for the most part) world that Potter and his friends inhabited should be forgotten as their real world of today was much different and harsher.
Now, I didn’t have an opinion one way or another on her premise, but I think her writing was a bit too dense and painting with way too broad a brush.
But if the millennials have to grow up, I guess I have to, too.
I came a little late to the Harry Potter hysteria.
When the first book came out (circa 1997) I was just in my 40s. So, from the start, I was not the intended demographics, but I wanted to find out what all the hype was all about. By the time I started reading them, I think the first three had been published. I was quickly under their spell almost immediately and was entranced by all the plots, subplots and characters.
Waiting for the fourth, fifth and six books was agonizing, and while I didn’t wait for the midnight opening of the local bookstore like many kids did (I’m asleep by midnight), I did have my copy the first week they was released.
Now for the last one, I was in Ireland at the time it came out. For that one, I did find myself waiting in the “queue” at a quaint small-town Irish bookstore and was rewarded by getting a different copy than the one released in America, which some say made it a collectors copy. The cover and size of the book were different and some words were different (For example, a “truck” in the U.S. version was a “lorry” in the Irish version).
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