Diagon Alley

This chapter is where Rowling starts really building her world. To this point, we've been in reasonably familiar locations, but we're about to fully immerse ourselves in the magical world, so that's what I'll be focusing on in this post, the differences and similarities between the wizarding world and ours. Who's excited? I know I am!

While it's been alluded to in previous chapters, we find out a little bit more about Owl Post. It turns out owls don't just deliver mail, but newspapers as well. We find out that they know when they need to be paid and how to go about making sure they don't get stiffed and at the end of the chapter we find out that owls can find the person they're supposed to deliver to with nothing more than a name. Basically, owls are pretty dang smart it turns out!

Hagrid tells Harry he flew to the island and Harry is certainly interested in the idea of flying. Now, exactly how Hagrid flew there is a mystery as we later find the wizards generally need a broom or some other enchanted item or magical creature to fly (unless you're Voldemort or Snape) and Hagrid in particular has to stick to Sirius' motorcycle. Now, if Hagrid used Sirius' motorcycle, how does he get it back? After he leaves Harry at the train, does he take the boat back over to the island and then take the motorcycle back? That would help explain how the Dursleys get back I suppose, but it seems like an awful lot of trouble.

It also turns out that wizards have their own form of government, the Ministry of Magic, who's main job, according to Hagrid, is to "keep it from Muggles that there's still witches an' wizards up an' down the country". This is really a simplified version of what the Ministry does and it's unclear as to whether Hagrid is trying to make it easy for the barely 11-year-old Harry to understand, or if that's what Hagrid thinks the Ministry does. We'll be getting more into the Ministry when we get to the later books.

The first place Harry and Hagrid go upon reaching Diagon Alley is Gringotts Wizard Bank, and its rife with important moments. We're told multiple times, in prose and in verse, that Gringotts would be impossible to rob, so that when later in the book we find that someone tried to do so that same day, we're duly impressed at the thief's daring. Brilliantly, Rowling lets us think she's played out the Gringotts angle, only to bring its impregnable qualities back to the forefront in Deathly Hallows. We also meet Griphook, and while it should be a rather glaring clue that he's the only Goblin that gets a name, I'll admit to being surprised when he turned up again later in the series. Gringotts also lets us learn that Hagrid wants a dragon, which becomes important soon, and we learn a bit about wizarding currency (and Rowling's apathy toward good math, 17 sickles to a galleon and 29 knuts to a sickle?! that's one messed up base scale! Not to mention, it really bugs me that earlier in the chapter a woman is complaining about the price of Dragon Livers at 17 sickles an ounce, THAT'S A GALLEON! No one prices something at 100 cents, it's a dollar!) Okay, so that's off my chest, moving on.

Next up Harry meets a boy we'll later learn is Draco Malfoy and discovers that there are unpleasant wizards just like Muggles. He also hears fun new words like "Quiddich", "Slytherin" and "Hufflepuff". Though he does ask Hagrid about them, we'll have to wait a bit longer to get much more than Quiddich is a sport and the other two are houses at Hogwarts.

Last thing Harry does is get his wand. He meets Mr. Ollivander, who it turns out is a pivotal character at the end of the series and learns that the "wand chooses the wizard" which may just be important as well. While all this set up is all very well and good, what I love about this chapter is finding out about people's wands. We hear that Lily's wand was made of willow and good for charms work (I don't have anything interesting about that) and that James' wand was mahogany and good for transfiguration (we know James was pretty good at Transfiguration, considering he and his buddies figured out how to become an animagus quite young, a truly tricky bit of Transfiguration). Hagrid's wand was oak, which we know are strong and tall, but it's Voldemort's that the most interesting, his wand was made of yew, a tree often found in graveyards, pretty ironic for a "man" who's greatest fear is death. The core of Voldemort's wand comes from Dumbledore's pet phoenix, Fawkes, which is interesting to consider as well. Then of course we find out that the wand Harry ends up with is Voldemort's wand's brother, I'm not going to talk about that right now though, because I'm pretty sure that comes up later.

Yep, pretty good chapter it turns out. On the surface its full of interesting tidbits and straight up fun (I really wish my banks vaults were a cart ride away), but when you look deeper, you find oodles of interesting clues about what's to come. What are some of your favorite places in Diagon Alley? Did I miss any big clues?

Keeper of the Keys

I'm moving! - Across the street! - To an apartment run by the same property management company I currently rent from! Why am I telling you this? Because my awesome property manager is going to give me the keys early and I'll have about two weeks to move my stuff, mostly after work and on weekends. Now, if the weather stays awesome, I might manage to retain enough energy to blog after moving all I can stand everyday, but if I don't, I don't want you to think I've forgotten you. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, speaking of life changing events, Harry's about to experience a doozy. Time to see who's at the door!

The door crashes to the floor and silhouetted in the doorway is a huge man. He comes in, makes himself comfortable, introduces himself as Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts, and proceeds to fill Harry in on the fact that there's magic, that he's a wizard, that his parents were killed by magic, and that he's headed to Hogwarts to study magic. Hagrid also gives Harry a birthday cake (his first (that he can remember)) and gives Dudley a pigs tail. The Dursleys all hide in the bedroom and Hagrid and Harry catch a few more z's before going shopping.

While in some respects, this could be considered a boring chapter, it's pretty much just a bunch of exposition after all, its so chock-full of hints, clues and foreshadowing, the observant reader will find themselves fascinated. I count no fewer than five important points in this short chapter.

1. Harry meets Hagrid. (duh) Hagrid not only tells Harry who and what he is, but he is the first adult Harry has ever known to treat him well. He stands up for Harry, answers his questions and shows Harry more respect than Harry's ever encountered before. Not surprisingly, the meeting creates an almost instantaneous bond between the two that will carry them straight through to the Forbidden Forest and the walk to Hogwarts in Deathly Hallows.

2. "Yeh look a lot like yer dad, but yeh've got yer mother's eyes." Hagrid's the first to say it, but we hear it from plenty of other people throughout the series. Observant readers quickly realized it had to mean something, and sure enough, this one, seemingly innocuous sentence, sets the stage for one of the most beautiful scenes in the series when Snape asks Harry to "Look at me".

3. Hagrid mentions the letter Dumbledore left. While it might not be as important as some of the other hints dropped in this chapter, we later discover that the letter Dumbledore left was not for Harry, but for Petunia, and that it was not the first time they had corresponded. That same letter may just be what later saves Harry's life at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix.

4. Speaking of Petunia, we start to see there's a little more to her than meets the eye. It's reasonably obvious the Vernon is against magic simply because he's an ass, but Petunia's vitriolic speech in which she calls her own sister a freak, could only come from a place of real emotion. We don't know yet what that emotion is, but we know there has to be more. I plan to talk a lot more about this in the future.

5. Hagrid tells Harry about Voldemort. Obviously this is a key bit of plot, for this book and the series as a whole. Before this moment, Harry thinks his parents dies in a a car crash and now he (and we) learn the truth...or as much of the truth as Hagrid knows. It's interesting to see how much Hagrid has guessed ("Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion. Dunno if he had enough human left in him to die.") and how much Hagrid got wrong ("You-Know-Who killed 'em. An' then - an' this is the real myst'ry of the thing - he tried to kill you, too. Wanted ter make a clean job of it, I suppose, or maybe he just liked killin' by then.) Regardless, the story Hagrid tells Harry is all Harry has to go on for the next four years in his battles with Voldemort.

One final thing this chapter brings up for me and that's the Trace. It seems obvious the Trace is being used to track Harry (how else would they know where he is?) but that brings up further questions as to how the Trace works. Is it attached to all wizards, or does it simply find magic? The way Voldemort modifies it in Deathly Hallows would imply the latter, but that would mean that Harry would have had to have (inadvertently) done magic in each of the places the Dursleys tried to hide, none of which is mentioned. Or is there some other, even creepier, big brother way of tracking wizards? If so, its either only for underage wizards, or Voldemort certainly would have used it in Deathly Hallows. Unless, perhaps there's some sort of self-destruct mode...

What do you think of my "important moments"? Would you add some? Do you disagree with me on any? What about the Trace? Does anyone else spend as much time trying to figure out how this stuff works as I do? I look forward to hearing from you!

The Letters from No One

Important decision to make today, does blogging "every day" mean on the weekends as well? I've decided that Saturdays, yes, Sundays, only if I feel like it. Decision made, moving on.

This is the chapter where we get to see Harry's sense of humor. Personally, I'm a big fan. In this chapter we get gems like:

"They stuff people's heads down the toilet the first day at Stonewall," [Dudley] told Harry. "Want to come upstairs and practice?"
"No, thanks," said Harry. "The poor toilet's never had anything as horrible as your head down it - it might be sick."

and

"What's this?" he asked Aunt Petunia. Her lips tightened as they always did if he dared to ask a question.
"Your new school uniform," she said.
Harry looked in the bowl again.
"Oh," he said, "I didn't realize it had to be so wet."

What can I say, it makes me laugh.

In the next scene a mysterious letter arrives for Harry but before he can read it, Vernon grabs it out of his hands. Now, as I don't live in England, I'm not sure of the legality of reading someone else's mail there, but were this the U.S., it's a bit of a problem. Of course, since the next thing Vernon does is throw both Harry and Dudley bodily from the room, there's obviously some more serious issues happening at old number four. I have to wonder if one of the reasons Harry never got to watch much TV was the Dursley's worry that he might discover that he was being rather horribly abused and report them. I'd love to see them play that off with their friends and neighbors.

I generally find this chapter to be pretty boring (except, of course, for the excerpts above). The first read through it might have been interesting to read about all the ways "they" tried to get the letters to Harry, but by now, I just want to get to the good stuff, namely Hagrid and Diagon Alley. Thankfully, it's midnight and someone is knocking on the shack's door...

The Vanishing Glass

I almost missed another day, getting far too caught up in Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future - Volume 1 to remember little Harry. (On a related note, I was inspired to create a new tag for my LibraryThing catalog: "geek porn" for which I have some very particular and yet nebulous criteria, so far only Wheaton's book and Russell T. Davies' The Writer's Tale qualify.) I've also got a couple Sam Smith Oatmeal Stouts in me now, which might make this post more interesting...or it might just make me sleepy after a long week.

So it's ten-years-later and Harry is living in the cupboard under the stairs, where he apparently rooms with a bunch of spiders. (I can't help but find it odd that uptight Petunia would allow any spiders in her house, even to torture Harry.) Oh, and it's Dudley's birthday. This is actually one of the (very few) scenes I prefer in the movie. "But last year - last year I had 37!", so much better than "That's two less than last year." particularly as the latter requires Dudley to do some rather quick math we he proves is all but impossible a paragraph later.

Harry's baby-sitter breaks her leg (does she really though? Is this addressed in Order of the Phoenix?) and Harry gets to go to the zoo with the family. Vernon tells Harry there better not be any funny business, which is a bit ridiculous, even for the Dursleys, but it turns out to be a pretty good way to tell us all the weird stuff that seems to happen around Harry, so we'll forgive it, and Harry proceeds to have a pretty good day (I have no idea what a Knickerbocker Glory is, (and I'm too lazy to look it up) but I'm pretty sure I want one). It's a good day until they go to the reptile house anyway, where Harry has a quick conversation with a snake before the glass on it's cage disappears and the snake escapes, thanking Harry on the way. Surely that snake thing won't come up again, right?

Harry is, of course, punished for the Great Snake Escape, even though there's no proof he had anything to do with it other than a traumatized boy mentioning that Harry was talking to the snake (no 10-year-old boy has ever done that before) but this gives Harry the opportunity to be retrospective and tell us about what he remembers of his parents' death (a lot of green light, sounds like a car crash to me alright) and that a bunch of weirdos do things like bow and wave and shake his hand (can't say I really blame Petunia for trying to avoid that, it's a bit creepy).

Changed the format a bit, thoughts?

The Boy Who Lived

See, I told you there was no way I'd actually be able to blog everyday, although, to be honest yesterday's absence had more to do with the sudden panic that I wouldn't have anything of interest to say about the first chapter than any pressing business I had to get done. Unless of course you consider watching the "extras" disc of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince pressing.

Anyway, here's the plan as it currently exists in my head. I often find when I'm reading this series that I have thoughts I want to talk to fellow Potterheads about and then I forget them by the time I have the opportunity, so I'm going to have this post open as I read and if and when these thoughts come to me (no pressure brain) I'll share them with you. This of course means, that anything that comes after this sentence is nothing more than free-flowing, unedited ideas, make of it what you will.

The Dursleys think they're normal and if your definition of normal is boring, nosy, and mean, I guess they are. Mr. Dursley heads to work and notices a lot of strange people around, which he does not appreciate. At one point he hears a group of these strange people talking about the Potters and a child name Harry, could they be talking about his in-laws? Surely not. Later that night he hears about more strange goings on on the news.

While the Dursleys sleep that night, a strange man appears on the street. He uses a lighter to put out all the lights on the street and then heads toward number 4. A cat that's been hanging out on the wall by the Dursleys all day, turns into Professor McGonagall, who greets the man as Professor Dumbledore. They have a conversation that doesn't make a whole lot of sense at this point and are soon joined by a huge man on a flying motorcycle caring a baby. There's some more talk that doesn't quite make sense yet, and they leave the baby, with a lightning shaped scar on his forehead, on the Dursley's doorstep along with a note.

I'm a big fan of Mary Grandpre's illustrations, and I always like to take a second to look at the drawing on the cover page, in this case, of Hogwarts. Scholastic's website has all the illustrations in color, which is pretty cool to see.

I always find it jarring when I read that Aunt Petunia is blond. In most cases, I've been able to avoid having the actor from the movie become the character that lives in my head, but Fiona Shaw is so brilliant, that she's completely taken over the character for me.

Rowling's narrative style has noticeably changed since the first book. The last time I reread Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, I noticed on my last reread that this is the only book where we're given a perspective that is not Harry's when Harry is in the scene (it's during Quiddich, we'll get there) and just now I've noticed that Rowling directly references the fact that she is narrating a story: "When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts..." I don't know why I find that interesting, but I do.

One of the things I miss most in the movies is cloaks and robes. Most of the adults manage to dress reasonably normally. The "robes" the girls wore to the Yuleball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (I'm going to start shortening the titles now, consider the "Harry Potter and the" part implied.) were dresses, pretty dresses, but definitely not robes.

We get the first hint at Rowling's knack for names with Jim McGuffin, who does exactly what a MacGuffin is supposed to do by forcing the plot to move along (in this case, making it so that Mr. Dursley has to mention the weirdness he's noticed).

Everyone knows that Rowling had a plan from the start and that there's a lot of set up in the earlier novels that pay off later. Even the first chapter is chock full of them: the mystery of just why the Dursleys hate the Potters so much, the Put-Outer, Voldemort's name, Dumbledore's letter to Petunia, Sirius' bike, and of course, the scar. All will come into play in the future in HUGE ways.

And now comes the hard part: ignoring the pull to keep reading, because once I get started with this series, it's hard to stop myself, even for sleep. I'm determined to do it slowly this time though, one chapter at a time.

Think I've said something stupid? Did I bring up something you've never thought of before (not really expecting that to have happened, but a girl can dream)? Please share your thoughts, I'd love for this to turn into a conversation and not stay a monologue.