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Recently, my boyfriend gave me his old Amazon Kindle (because he got one of the newer models). This inspired me, after about four or five years of not really picking up a book outside of school, to start reading for fun again. The first book that I "picked up" was Harry Potter and the.. stone.. of the wise ("Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" apparently).
The book
I've never written a book review before, but since Harry Potter is kind of a really popular genre and this is the first time I read one of the books, I wanted to give my opinion on it.
Now usually, I don't really enjoy the fantasy genre. Something about it is just a bit uninteresting to me, and I don't necessarily enjoy reading something that's unrelated to (my) reality. I usually need entertainment to be somewhat relatable to me and my life, and fantasy and science fiction don't always do that for me; I don't really enjoy things like Star Wars, but I do enjoy, for example, the Netflix show Black Mirror, because it touches topics that I do come in contact with in my own life.
But because the first Harry Potter book introduced the entire thing in such a great way, making the reader follow along with Harry's journey of also figuring out all of the magic stuff that is new to both him and the reader, it felt like a lot better of an introduction to me.
Reading the first three quarters or so of the book, I honestly had a blast. The story was being told so well and all of the details and emotions were depicted so extensively, the places were described with a depth that made me be able to envision them perfectly in my head.
But then, to my (negative) surprise, suddenly, towards the last couple of chapters of the book, the tone shifted. All of a sudden, the story was being told in such a rushed, quick way; especially what should've been the climax of the book. To me, it felt like the author was getting scared of missing her deadline and stopped writing in the way that I had started to love so much.
I would definitely say that I enjoyed the book (which is saying quite a lot, because fantasy is definitely not my kind of genre), and I plan on also reading the other entries in the series, but to me, it felt like the later in the book I was, the more the quality of what I was reading was declining, which was such a bummer to me because J.K. Rowling seems to be a really good author.
Also, regarding the stuff that's happening with whatever J.K. is saying right now: If she or anyone else thinks it's okay to retroactively pretend like there's diversity where there simply isn't any: In my opinion, it's not okay. Just accept that your writing in that regard just isn't up to the standard of what it should be in the 21st century. Characters shouldn't be gay, black or another minority for the sake of "showing diversity" or "making a statement", but because diversity like that just happens to exist in the real world.
The Kindle
There's honestly not much to say about the Kindle, because everything that I could say can be easily summed up into this: I absolutely love it. It's one of the older generation Paperwhites (maybe even the first one, I'm not sure), and the e-ink is amazing, the menus are easy to navigate, being able to change the font is great. It's just all round an awesome experience, especially because, with Amazon Prime, which pretty much everyone seems to have, you have Prime Reading, which allows you to read quite a big amount of books for free (without even having to get Kindle Unlimited).
Seriously, if you enjoy reading, but don't enjoy carrying heavy books around with you while you're traveling, I really think you should get a Kindle.