Book challenge #23: A book set in high school

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J K Rowling

Although I have finished several books lately, I’ve been struggling to concentrate. The prospect of starting a book has been sometimes difficult, daunting. This happens to me occasionally but has happened a lot recently. Generally my approach is to read a children’s book, and this time, it was, again, Harry Potter. It helped. It was also massively enjoyable to see all the “omg it’s like Snape can read minds???” which made me laugh every time. The howler will probably never fail to make me cringe in sympathy. My fear of spiders existed long before reading this but I’m sure it didn’t help.

I don’t need to tell you about Harry Potter. I don’t need to list the reasons that I love it, because either you get it, or you’re not interested anyway. But what I do need is to reiterate that it provides a certain kind of comfort, a safety, that, for me, few other books can. It feels clichéd (it is clichéd) to refer to re-reading as returning to old friends, but also, it is…

Also, as a nod to the category I’m putting it in, I never thought that boarding school would be that fun, not because of Harry Potter or any of the other boarding school books I read, partly because I’d miss my family and non-school friends, and partly because I was picked on a lot at school, so being in that environment all the time seemed foolish at best. I was always – and continue to be – confused by people who read Harry Potter and wanted to go to boarding school.

Other categories that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets fits into: a book that became a movie, a book with non-human characters, a funny book, a book by a female author, a mystery or thriller, a book you can finish in a day, a book from your childhood, a book set in high school, a book with magic, a book set during Christmas, a banned book

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