Summer reading 2011.

These are the books I read this past summer, presented in chronological order and with minimal commentary because I'm currently occupied with much less recreational reading. Critical thinking on writing composition theory, anyone?

Italics indicate books I had read previously; bold type marks my recommendations. [If I re-read it, that's a recommendation in itself.]

The Truth About Forever -- Sarah Dessen
Prague -- Arthur Phillips
How Did You Get This Number -- Sloane Crosley
What Now? -- Ann Patchett
Nine Stories -- J. D. Salinger
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- Gary Shteyngart
The Phantom Tollbooth -- Justin Norton
A Widow For One Year -- John Irving
Someone I Loved -- Anna Gavalda
I Am Charlotte Simmons -- Tom Wolfe
Indecision -- Benjamin Kunkel
The Luneberg Variation -- Paolo Maurensig
Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel García Márquez
Selected Stories -- E. M. Forster
The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
The School of Essential Ingredients -- Erica Bauermeister
Old School -- Tobias Wolff
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation -- Elizabeth Berg
Still Alice -- Lisa Genova
Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins
The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery
Interpreter of Maladies -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Music Lesson -- Katharine Weber
One Day -- David Nicholls
Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food -- Jennifer 8 Lee
The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era -- Geoffrey Douglas
A Moveable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- Lynne Truss
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris -- John Baxter
The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro

"Congratulations! You are magical."

At 3:57 a.m. on July 27, 2011, a webpage validated my childhood.

I don't know why I chose to refresh the Pottermore tab when I did. I'd almost written it off and gone to bed, at least for a nap, but I've never really been able to shake the feeling that I'm going to miss something wonderful in my sleep. It was silly to even stay awake that long, knowing full well that the clue could be posted at any hour of the day, British Summer Time (BST). One click later, I was clambering up on my pile of laundry to reach for my copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- the same copy I've had for over ten years, for over half of my life. The spine is just barely intact.

The clue: "How many breeds of owl are on the Eeylops Owl Emporium sign? Multiply this by 49." Chapter Five: Diagon Alley, page 72, US edition: "A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium -- Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy." Five times forty-nine. I did the mental math, held my breath while I did it again, then typed quill.pottermore.com/245 into my address bar, which redirected me to...

"Try to catch it to enter." YOU TEASES.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting the Sony homepage, but the floating feathers seemed about right. For the record, the Magical Quill is the glowing one. I mean...duh. Having maaaybe just the slightest difficulties with my small motor skills, I had to click around a few times before I actually got it, but of course, the point is that I GOT IT.

OMG OMG OMG.

Even the wizarding world has paperwork, though I only wish most forms in life could be as easy to fill out as this one:

Who do they think they're asking? I mean, come on.

It's a miracle that I managed to make it through all the submission forms without misspelling my name or any other pertinent information. If a Quick-Quotes Quill could turn Ronald Weasley into Roonil Wazlib, my name was just rife for keyboard fumbling errors. Then, finally, this screen:

"Congratulations! You are magical."

Has there ever been such a thrilling sequence of words? In league with phrases like "I love you," "it's a boy/girl," and "your hair looks great today," J. K. Rowling once again managed to choose exactly the right welcome to the wizarding world. Congratulations, because you are magical. It's just what we've all been waiting to hear. "Yer a wizard, Harry."

"FrogBludger" sounds vicious. So does "ChaserDragon," actually.

In the wake of more embarrassing Harry Potter-related confessions (see previous entry), I have no qualms now admitting that my first email username was "phoenixfeather4." I loved Harry Potter, I loved mythology, and I loved alliteration. Choosing "PhoenixProphecy184" from a randomly generated list of Pottermore usernames feels like coming full circle.

A log-in page to the WIZARDING WORLD.

I still didn't really believe it, but the screen doesn't lie:

"You've successfully validated your early access Pottermore account."

Be still, my beating heart.

I AM MAGICAL. ϟ

Herm-own-ninny.

Everyone has some skeletons in their closet. This is one of mine.
(Double posting today because I wrote this on the way home from Chicago and just remembered it now.)

I remember my first foray into the Harry Potter universe with what can only be described as shame. Having caught Potter fever in its early but decidedly dire stages, I was finishing up a much-labored-over presentation on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to my fourth-grade class, who I imagined could have been nothing less than enraptured with my inspired recounting of the story. This was, for the record, likely also the first but not last instance of my burning the midnight oil to finish a paper to my insane personal standard of satisfaction. Digression: two years later, I would find myself embarrassed with the gentle criticism on a twelve-page analysis, so-called, of Louis Sachar’s Holes that my English teacher informed me was a good effort, but more a retelling than a report. Considering that I had doubled the recommended page length and had an un-athletic sixth-grader’s difficulty applying adequate force to the stapler when it came time to hand it in, she wasn’t wrong. At the time, I thought myself some sort of feverishly inspired literary journalist, duty-bound to inform the masses of the brilliantly rendered coming-of-age story that I had already read twice that summer; actually, I had just babbled on for pages and pages with my keyboard only too willing to cooperate in an embarrassing outpouring of seriously-no-one-cares. I only made that mistake once. End digression.

I remember distinctly the boy I argued with: Billy Morris, forever engraved into my memory as the teasing little twerp who called me “Pancake,” which certain current friends of mine have appropriate into more a term of endearment than the bizarre juvenile disparagement it was originally intended as. (Thanks, friends.) I can’t vouch for much wit on my part as a generally speech-shy fourth grader, but I know that most comebacks I made to that round-faced blond kid inevitably played on the pun of Billy Morris living in Morristown. Clever and also hilarious! Or maybe not, but I’ll never forget his name. Unfortunately, that means he stands out in my admittedly selective memory as my antagonist in a heated debate over the correct pronunciation of Hermione, the bookish, smart and occasionally smart-alecky female best friend, with whom I and thousands of other readers inevitably identified: I was, and here comes the confession, a proponent of the “Hermy-own” theory. I have absolutely no idea where I came by this pronunciation, and even less regarding the origins of the particular conviction with which I self-righteously and incorrectly corrected he who dared to challenge me. But seriously, what a little creep: was I the one giving this report, or wasn’t I?

The release of Goblet of Fire, with Rowling’s sly lesson in How To Correct Widespread Misperceptions About Your Main Characters (or alternately, “Get Your Shit Right, Readers: 101”), dealt a devastating blow to my argument. For the benefit of more casual Potter fans who can’t quite remember the scene I’m referring to, not even Hermione’s Yule Ball date Viktor Krum can get her name down, and Harry hears her correcting the clueless foreigner on the dance floor: “Her-MY-oh-nee,” she enunciates. I went through a few stages of grief after that scene, not least of which was denial: “What a stupid way to pronounce it!” If arrogance were one of the stages of grief, I could check that one off, too: “My way is totally better.” I came around, eventually; a fifth-grade independent study I conducted on all things Harry Potter (my school district really let Gifted & Talented kids get away with anything) inspired an exhaustive exploration of character name origins, leading me to discover the beloved authoress’s habit of adopting literary names, Hermione having been appropriated from the queen in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. When confusion ensued about character names during a read-through of the play in my senior year AP Lit class, I basked in the knowledge that this time around, I really was right about Her-my-oh-nee.

Until the very end.

It's been a while since my last update. Sorry (to all three of my readers). I spent the last few days in and around Chicago, trying to relive Ferris Bueller's Day Off with limited success, although I did learn a lot about art and architecture along the way. On the home front, I've been trying to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for the greatest cinematic event of my lifetime:

I couldn't exaggerate my excitement if I tried. When I was in fifth grade, I spent half a year researching for an independent study on all things Harry Potter, compiling a hefty biography on J. K. Rowling (stands for "Joanne Kathleen" -- her publishers suggested she use her initials to avoid alienating young male readers; lacking a middle name, she adopted her grandmother's first name), creating a collage larger than my entire eleven-year-old upper body, and becoming irritatingly Hermione-like in my inability to stop blurting out the origins of character names in casual conversation. I got an A++++. True story.

There's not much point to this post but to stall until I start re-reading Deathly Hallows again, one last time before everything changes. Of course, after the movie ends, I can just start all over again, and again, and again.

Zorbing.

It's 5 a.m. on a Saturday. Two movies, three slushies, and a pack of Oreos later, last night bled into this morning. Thanks to a wholly engrossing crossword puzzle that kept four of us slumped around my friend's kitchen table in varying states of wakefulness and denial far longer than we'll admit, it was lighter outside when we left than when we arrived. The sunrise drive home through otherwise quiet streets, singing along to "Anna Sun," came straight out of a John Hughes movie -- at least, even if the lighting was a bit dim and casting atypical (for movies that inspire so many slumber parties, the Brat Pack movies feature surprisingly few interactions between female friends), I like to think we got the feeling right.

"Zorbing" is a song that should have appeared on my summer playlist, had I discovered it in time. I'm at least two years late, considering it was originally released as a single in June 2009, then re-released on Stornoway's debut album in May last year, but cut me some slack; not even this Anglophile can keep up to date on British bands in addition to American ones. The song comes off as quintessentially English, not only with regards to the obviously un-American pronunciations, but the actual vocabulary of the lyrics, e.g. what are conkers and where is Cowley? (horse chestnut seeds, here more commonly known as buckeyes; about 58 miles northwest of London in Oxfordshire) Most importantly, is zorbing an actual thing? Is it some kind of veiled drug reference or regional sexual euphemism? Happily enough, zorbing is pretty much exactly what it sounds like if you stop to imagine your own definition for it, disregarding the absurdity of the thought: "Zorbing (globe-riding, sphereing, orbing) is the recreation of rolling downhill in an orb, generally made of transparent plastic." Think hamster ball, think Jake Gyllenhaal in Bubble Boy, think the real-life incarnation of your greatest childhood fantasy...unless maybe that was just me. Whatever. Basically, zorbing sounds like the best thing to come out of New Zealand since Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford, and an awesome pastime that the United States should adopt posthaste. It's also a really great song that I've had on repeat for a week.

Zorbing - Stornoway [lyrics]

Lying in your attic
I can feel the static
The storm has broken, Heaven's open
So electrifying, oh, I'm nearly flying
Lost my heart between the sheets of lightning