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June 28, 2004
Reading instead of knitting
I spent the weekend finishing the 5th book in the Harry Potter series - I started reading book 3 earlier in the week, on the recommendation of my sister. And you know, those books are real page-turners (as any kid can tell you.)
To twist this around into a knitting-related entry, I can tell you that Hermione takes up knitting in book 5 for her pet charity cause!
I'm going to quiz my kids, the older two anyhow, about their feelings on these books, since they've both read all five of them. The books get successively more dark and complex as they go foward, touching on many subjects and ideas that I hadn't expected: totalitarianism; freedom of the press; capital punishment; bullying; slavery; tolerance; inter-racial marriage; class warfare and poverty (I'm sure I could think of more if I didn't have to rush off to get some coffee started.) What I'm curious about is whether the kids have been able to extrapolate these concepts from Harry Potter's world to ours. Did they see the parallels to Hitler? to the civil rights movement?
Well, it made for good reading for ME, anyhow.
Highly recommended.