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Are you ever too stubborn for your own good? It happens to me probably more than I would like to admit. It almost happened to me with Harry Potter. It’s hard to say why exactly I was so against the idea of reading the series, what held me back for so long, but i just know that for a long time, I just refused. Until I didn’t, and my whole geeky world changed.
To me, at the time, as an 18 year old kid, Harry Potter was kids stuff. I hadn’t really heard that much about the series as I was finishing up high school, and it wasn’t until I was working at a book store, where we had parents constantly coming in and looking for it for their kids, and teenagers looking for it for themselves. It was located in our kids’ section, and I just thought it was simply kids stuff, and I was too busy and cool to be interested.
It was one of the few times in my life that I have ever felt too cool for anything. Sure, as a book store employee, I had plenty of my coworkers telling me I needed to read it, but I still just felt weird about the idea of picking up a kids book and reading it. I thought I had outgrown those things.
Luckily, a couple of the other employees were pretty insistent and stubborn themselves and kept pushing me, and I finally picked up the first book on paperback. I brought it home and gave it a try. I was sucked in pretty quick. I n a lot of ways it felt like what I was expecting, but in a lot of ways it was totally unexpected.
The one thing that JK Rowling has mastered from the beginning is world building. She had, in book one, created a world that was as rich and deep as anything else I had ever read. That world, the wizarding world, sucked me in and has never let me go. I can’t escape it. Not that I want to.
This was a pretty great lesson for me. It might sound weird, or like something I wouldn’t be interested in, but when people I trust recommend something to me, I am more willing to more quickly give it a try. It might just be my next Harry Potter.
Has there ever been a fandom, a show or movie or book that people have recommended to you, but it took you a while to come around and now you love it? What was it? I’d love to hear about it. You can comment on this post, or you can email me directly at [email protected].
