B re-reads Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I started reading this book on a weekend away in Melbourne. For more details, see Chuck’s tumblr.

I almost didn’t take the book with me. After all, I had da little bit of Philosopher’s Stone left over and I wasn’t planning on doing too much reading over the weekend. Thank god I did take it because I devoured it!

Chamber of Secrets is one of my least favourite HP books. My levels of love for the HP books goes something like this:

Adore: Prisoner of Azkaban / Half-blood Prince
Love: Deathly Hallows
Have a crush: Goblet of Fire
Date: Philosopher’s Stone
If you asked me out I’d be really mean about saying no: Chamber of Secrets / Order of the Phoenix

So I was only really reading Chamber of Secrets because it’s part of the series but it was so much more than that! In my head, issues like the school being horrible to Harry run through the whole novel like a bad analogy, ruining it for me. However, it’s all drama, drama, drama and so exciting! The Harry-hating actually isn’t too bad. I must have been feeling very sensitive the first time I read it. The giants spiders are terrifying, the basilisk is super-scary and Fawkes is a Legend.

When I read the books, in my head the characters are not replaced by their movie counter-parts. Harry is still my imagining of Harry, not Daniel Radcliffe as Harry. Same with Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore – almost all of them. Some pick up characteristics. Snape sounds like Alan Rickman because I want him to and Professor McGonagall looks more like Dame Maggie Smith than she did before. However, Professor Gilderoy Lockhart has completely morphed into Kenneth Branagh. The hair, the smile, the creepiness – it’s all there in my head now, winking at me unpleasantly.

On the topic of the movies, it is delightful to be re-reading the books and seeing how faithful the early movies were. Any changes made were done for the purposes of movie-making and do not impede on the story telling at all. So very rare in a movie adaptation.

Chamber of Secrets was so much better than I was expecting it to be and I am so happy to have re-read it now and enjoyed every minute. Time to read: 3 days