A Book That Reminds Me of Home // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 10

Today is the tenth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book that reminds you of home".

I feel that I've shot myself in the foot a bit here in terms of blog post topics.

As you can see from the intro above, today's challenge is "a book that reminds you of home". In order to choose a book for this prompt, I decided to reflect a little on what "home" means to me. After a bit of thought, I decided that home for me means where my family is. Unfortunately, I've already talked about my family, in my blog post about My Family and Other Animals. Clearly, I did not think this through.

I say all that to say, if this post seems slightly repetitive or similar to Day 8 of this blog challenge, please forgive me. It's been a long week.

Now, without any more excuses, here is my choice for today's challenge: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The Harry Potter books have been a significant part of my family's life since the first book came out, when it was initially only my mum and my brother who read the books. As the years went by, most of us began to get hooked on the series as well. At the same time, we all kept up with the release of the new films, religiously going to see each one at the cinema when it came out. Several of us even bought copies of The Cursed Child simultaneously when that (awful) script was published. For many years, it was possibly second only to Star Trek in terms of the media which we were most unanimously fans of.

In part because of its association with my family and my childhood, the Harry Potter books and films have long been a source of comfort and nostalgia for me. This isn't solely owed to my family, however. Part of the reason the HP world is so reassuringly familiar is due to the stories itself, which I know so well by now that coming back to these stories is, in some ways, like returning to a family home. I know the place, the people, the history of what has happened here, and I supposedly know what to expect when I revisit it. Supposedly.

There is a saying, that you can't go home again. It's like that quote about how no man steps in the same river twice, as by the time he takes another step both he and the river are changed. Home is much the same. As fondly as we might remember it from our childhood, when we return to it older and wiser, it may be difficult to see in the same light. I find that this has very much happened to me with the Harry Potter series, and it is primarily due to one person: J. K. Rowling herself.

To be completely frank, I was initially hesitant about writing this post. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Rowling lately, to the point that many people (myself included) became wary of giving any more support - financial or otherwise - to the Harry Potter franchise.

If you are unaware of what's been going on with J. K. Rowling, basically it's this: she's a transphobe. If you want more detail than that, Aja Romano and Katlyn Burns have both written excellent articles on the subject, explaining what happened and why people are angry. Romano's article particularly focuses on the timeline of Rowling's self-embarrassment and the response of HP fans to it, while Burns' piece puts Rowling's transphobia in the broader context of rising TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) ideology in the UK. I would recommend reading both if you have the time.

While this recent event was definitely the most egregious of Rowling's gaffes, it was by no means the first. There has been suspicion building over her possibly being transphobic for a while now, as the articles mentioned above explain. On top of that, people have been critical of Rowling for a number of other reasons, from her endless retconning of the source material (in case you haven't kept up, Dumbledore is gay and also wizards and witches used to soil themselves in public) to racism that apparently cropped up in the original books, Pottermore, and the new films. For the HP fandom, Rowling has become increasingly like an out-of-touch old relative who either doesn't know or doesn't care how offensive they keep being. In Rowling's case, I imagine it's a bit of both.

Now, I don't have the time nor the inclination to get into a debate over "separating the art from the artist" and whether or not we can continue to love Harry Potter while avoiding supporting a harmfully transphobic celebrity. I simply felt that I couldn't write this post without addressing the "Rowling issue". Yet in some ways, including this in a post about a book that reminds me of home makes perfect sense. Like I said earlier, returning to media that we loved as children isn't always easy. We see things with new eyes, and what we see isn't always as pure as we remembered. This is something that we all have to deal with in returning to those things we remember fondly, be they books, homes, or even people. Whether or not those things can continue to hold the same place in our heart afterwards is something only we can decide.

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I would like to end this post by sharing a video on J. K. Rowling by one of my favourite YouTubers. Even if you're not sure how to approach the Harry Potter books in light of this controversy, one thing we can always do is support trans creators, like the incredibly talented Kat Blaque.