I can't believe months have passed since I last posted. May and June flew by, for sure, and here I am in the wee hours of July 3rd, not able to sleep. Since I just lent my niece Abigail my copy of The Half Blood Prince, I figured I might as well come here and talk about its predecessor, Order of the Phoenix.
A lot of people don't like that book. I love it, because it's exactly what Harry at 15 should be - an unlikeable little git. He's moody, thinks he knows it all, yells at people for no reason, is impulsive and severely unhappy when things don't go his way. He also has his eyes opened to the fact that there's more to life than just Hogwarts, and it enters the book into new territory.
This book is humongous, which is hella nice, as it lets you really submerge yourself in the Potter world. Also, since a lot of the book is just being in Harry's feelings and thoughts, it reads slower, but I like and enjoy that part. I like the ominous feeling all throughout the book that danger is coming, that it is imminent, that things will happen that will hurt Harry's world.
I was thinking a lot about this book today I guess mostly because I spent a lot of today remembering what it was like to be 15. How funny it is that a lot of the little things that I know I've left behind can resurface quickly, but also, to realize that something that I cared about so much then (God) still has such a presence in my life. I kept wondering about Harry himself and how in his selfishness and self-centered he was able to learn to be the calm and more likable Harry from the next books. I was amazed to realize during today's Sermon that I would not be the person that I am today if I hadn't been the little Jesus Freak I was at 15. I hope that I am giving, and loving, and accepting of others - something I learned to be during those years at that Church. And although by the end of the Sermon I was also arguing in my head (it was the "The Lord loved you so much, lost lamb, that He left behind 99 lambs to go get you, and the angels rejoice more over that found lost lamb than over the 99 that do not need finding" Sermon. I get it, God loves the lambs, but I always wonder about the 99 well behaved one's that are left without someone taking care of them,) I was also aware of how present He is in my life, how entrenched this is in my family. It's like part of our culture, almost, in a way even a family tradition. I've written poems about this, but never have been able to properly portray how... hurt I can be, when explaining this to friends and their eyes glaze over, because I'm talking God and Family, and all they're thinking is hate-mongering religion, and don't realize that this is as much a part of my personal culture as listening to Merengue and speaking Spanish is.
But I've veered off. I meant to talk about how Harry's belief system is developed in Book 5, how he slowly becomes the man that will only have himself (and Ron and Hermione) to depend on, because he's been stripped away of those that are authority figures for him. And most importantly, this book, starts the race to the end.
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