The importance of "Harry Potter"

Last night we went to see the last movie of Harry potter series. You might hate everything related to harry potter and it’s blockbusters and the whole craze about it, then you can simply skip this post. But if you read on, I will tell you why I like it and why I have to argue with some of my friends when I keep defending harry potter everywhere I go. One of necessities of life besides food is the world of fantasy for me. I cannot imagine a world without it. If you are a fantasy freak like me, you know there are a few great fantasy book have been written and also been successful worldwide. So little, that you can almost count them by fingers. I’m not going to list them all here and act as a Wikipedia entry. I just mention some of them, which had a deep impact on me and my way of thinking. When I was at high school, I was so bored with the mathematics classes that I always found refugee in the school library, which I was lucky to find some treasures such as Homer’s “Iliad and Odyssey”. I kept reading without knowing that I was reading one of the greatest fantasy book ever written. I didn’t know how the hours passed when I was going trough the pages and that is how I survived the high school. Before that, when I was younger, there was ”The never ending story” by “Michael Ende”. I read that book so many times that the pages split apart and had to bind it by myself. Not an easy job I confess, for a five hundred pages book. I asked my father for help and he made a very lovely leather case that I still have it in my library, in a good shape. It was truly a never-ending story to me. I never liked the movie they made based on this book, because such imagination and those details can not easily fit in a two or three hours movie. If you know a child about ten years old, please be an angel and give him or her this book as a gift. Although this a hard time to encourage children to read books, when there are easier kinds of entertainments out there. That’s one of the reasons I want to tell you about the importance of Harry potter. It made these Xbox generation children to read and if you have read it or at least seen the books in a bookstore, you will admit it’s not an easy read. It’s a wonder that children all over the world read over 5000 pages and loved it. Of course I’m not going to count the adults and how much they enjoyed it as well, at this matter. Then there was the word of “Narnia” and “Aslan”, who made me think about religion in an entirely different way. And years later, a real fantasy, almost near to perfection with “The Lord of the Rings” made me think of all these great minds who gifted our world with such delight and wisdom. With heroes who keep our hearts warm in the darkest times. What would we do without them? I kept thinking about those great names: Homer, Shakespear, Tolkein, C.S.Lewis, Ende … but deep down I had this feeling that the world of fantasy, so dear to my heart, belongs to the men. They have created the beloved heroine, but imagine if a woman could write a fantasy, and how would that be? And then one day a friend whom we shared same interests in books came to me and gave me the first harry potter book and said, read it. I confess I wasn’t that bewitched with the book till the third one, and when I found out that the author was a woman, as I was reading more and more I became excited about the fact that I discovered another fantasy world which all the elements go together in details and it gives you such great characters and all written, at last, by a woman. I cannot say how much it grieves me that the hero is not a girl or “Hermoine Grenger” is not the name of the book. But after this huge success, I’m sure Joanne Rowling will proudly write her complete name on her new books with the main character as a girl. Well, that is something to cheer me up. Until then I will enjoy living in a time when I could read these great fantasies and enjoy the fun of watching them being made as a movie on a big screen, where everyone, no matter what age they are, can experience a fantasy world on a Sunday afternoon, even as little as 120 minutes of their lifetime.