Harry Potter and the Big Fat No

Whop.

I decided to lift my fiction embargo for the week we’re at the beach. At the strong yet subtle urging of the universe, I also decided that Harry Potter would be among my beach reading selections, along with a few books by Yasunari Kawabata, and maybe a yoga thing or two. I went to Borders tonight to buy a copy of the first book. (No way I would get this one from the library – icky kid germs. I’m that way.) It’s been a long day, and I was determined not to linger. Just march in, hit the young adult section, grab a copy, and get on my way. Thing was, I couldn’t find it, even after perusing the shelves several times I realized that I would rather continue lurking in the young adult section, feeling like I was going to end up on a watch list somewhere, than suffer the embarrassment of admitting that my intellectual ass was both looking for and unable to find Harry Potter.

It’s not like I’ve got that douchey notion that things that are popular can not also be good. Lots of things are both popular and good. Chocolate chip cookies, for example. Sex. The Beatles. I am not a douche. Still, I could not bring myself to ask. I wandered the store (at least the part that still sells books) for a while, and there were all of these books by fabulous authors that I just haven’t gotten around to yet. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. William Faulkner. Good, useful things to put in my brain over vacation! Somewhere between Joyce Carol Oates and Chaim Potok, I saw Fight Club, and decided that would be a great pick for the week. It’s been on my meaning-to-read-it list for over nine years. Perfect. Not too heavy, but still excellent modern writing. I was on my way to the register, when I noticed the little self-service kiosk. I stopped, checked to make sure no one was watching, typed in “Harry Potter,” and quickly learned why I couldn’t find it. It’s in the kids’ section.

I made my way back to the kids’ section, and picked up a copy, fully expecting the be appalled by the first paragraph. I read the first two pages, and it made me smile. The painfully insistent Britishness of it reminded me of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, which I loved; those books shaped my sense of humor considerably. Of course, I also loved them when I was fourteen, and while I still enjoy quoting them… well, who I am kidding? I am sure I would enjoy the trilogy as much now as I did the first few times I read it. Even knowing that, I decided that if I was going to fill my head with fiction for the next week, it was going to be more useful.

Twenty minutes later, driving down 83, I was still grinning about the guy getting ready for work and picking out his most boring tie.

So, maybe I’ll go back tomorrow morning. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll read it, and get inspired, and I’ll write something that is both popular and successful and enthralls everyone in the universe except for people like me, and I’ll be wealthy and powerful enough to go blonde and buy a normal looking nose for myself, just like J.K. Rowling did. Actually, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to buy a new nose. But I could definitely bring myself to buy a group of people who would tell me that my nose is normal, and sometimes even glamorous.

Foop.