goblet o' fire

so my husband and i went and saw the new harry potter movie last night. it was very good. after seeing all of the movies so far, it makes me want to read the books. maybe if i get started now i'll be able to finish the fifth book before the fifth movie comes out.

i used to love reading. when we would go up to the public library i would leave with an armful of books. i remember getting a lot of notices about books being overdue because i would either check out too many at once, or would get lost in a couple and read them over and over again. now i'm not a huge reader. i think senior english and then college ruined it for me.

in my senior english class we didn't get to choose from a list of books. instead we all read the same books together. it wasn't so much that we had to read the same book, it's that the quizzes/tests we took after we'd had a reading assignment were so into little details. i couldn't remember what color the vase was on the table rebecca set her glasses on in chapter seven. there was a vase? i could remember a summary of what happened and keep most of the important parts in mind.

junior english was different. we had a list of books we could choose from. we didn't have quizzes on what we read. instead we had assignments; writing assignments. analyze one paragraph from your book. any paragraph, any chapter, any book, as long as the book was on the list. write how your life is similar/different from that of the main character. write what you learned about life from this book. death? family? relationships? what were all these things like in this book?
so instead of picking my brain to see if i remembered a tiny detail (which would prove i did my homework), i got to tell about what i read. i went deeper into what is written on those pages. that made it kinda fun for being schoolwork.

then came college. so many different books to read for just one class, the multiply that times five. not many of those books were very fun to read. i only like technical reading when it;s about something i'm interested in. like music, italy, or audio/video production stuff (but even then it can be a bore). in college, it's almost as if your professors think you're only in one class for the entire semester. and that just doesn't make all the reading you have to do any fun.

now that i've been out of college for about a year and a half, i'm starting to get back into leisure reading. i still get bored with it sometimes, and my mind wanders off because it's hard for me to focus on the words, but i think i might actually enjoy reading the harry potter books. i mean, the movies were good, why shouldn't the books be?