For Harry Potter fans

Superstitious people say that when you experience a full body chill, it means that someone is walking over your future gravesite. If that's so, then I'll probably be buried right in the middle of Trafalgar Square, where thousands of people gathered yesterday for the final red carpet premiere of the Harry Potter series, which opens next week on the very night of my 18th birthday. Of course, the wizarding age of becoming legal is 17, so the correlation is slightly off, but still, it is the end of childhood for me and for those cute little wizards and witches who somehow all had the luck to grow up and be attractive.

Although I didn't start reading Harry Potter till about 7th grade, and I've never been one of those diehard fans (quite frankly, some of those movies are pretty dull, the books are angsty, and the characters don't use NEARLY enough magic as Rowling created potential for in her world), for a fiction writer to reach this degree of fame in this century without any "Wizards Suck" movies made and actually receiving positive reviews from critics worldwide and even from the Vatican press? (Catholics have pretty darn good taste, man) Admiration and obsession are warranted.

The Harry Potter books are absolutely absorbing. There is one degree of literature and film that I call 'the vicarious dream', when the reader or viewer feels such a degree of oneness with the work of art that he or she is overwhelmed at the end and needs a moment of reflection and that sense of deep regret that there aren't 100 pages left to read. Woahhh when teenagers want a 500 page book to be longer, you know there's something special in there somewhere.

So I am putting aside the four other books I have started in the past couple weeks (Satanic Verses, Autograph Man, To the Lighthouse, Eating Animals) which have yet to catch my fancy (Virginia Woolf uses 11 commas on the first page, in one sentence, of her sensationally successful novel. And peers always tell me to cut my sentences down...) and rereading that final Harry Potter. I will probably be disappointed by the movie. I've been disappointed by all the others and all movie ever made based on my favorite bits of literature. Yet, I will conform, for the world for once made a good choice in choosing a global obsession. It'll all be over in a few months; the new Twilight movie will hit like a hangover, and an even newer craze will strike. But perhaps, Harry will remain that childhood favorite. Nancy Drew prevailed, the Simpsons prevailed, Woody Allen prevailed, Potter will prevail.

And Malfoy will always be my favorite.