What I'm Reading

Logo pinched from BlogD but at least it's not hotlinked!

This is more of a guilty admission than anything else. It's not because I feel guilty for reading what I'm reading but because it's taken me so long to read the book I'm currently working on for reasons that aren't especially flattering to me. My husband wrote 3 novel-length Harry Potter 'fan fiction' stories quite awhile ago which have been enthusiastically received by many readers both through my brother-in-law's blog (from which they can be downloaded) and a Harry Potter fan site called Fiction Alley.

While my husband was writing these, we had some conflicts early on in the process because I offered him input which he rejected and the subsequent arguing left a lingering sense of anxiety when it came to his stories. I also have to admit that he put a tremendous amount of time in them, sometimes at my expense and that resentment of our lost time together was attached to the stories as well.

Much time has since passed and I've finally separated all the emotional baggage from the experience of reading the books and am about 90% through his first story. I'm enjoying the story very much and, as many readers have done, I'm losing sleep trying to finish the story.

My husband's stories were written before Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and two of them take place in year 6 and year 7 of Harry's time at Hogwarts. I can't say much about the second or third books though as I have't gotten to them yet. I can say that a lot of the things J.K. Rowling does which are irritating are absent in his stories albeit at the expense of advancing the maturity of the characters beyond their chronological years in some cases. However, it's a small price to pay for the lack of abject stupidity and one-dimensional character behavior you see in some of her books. If you are a big Harry Potter fan and can open your mind to an 'alternate history' version of the series, you'll enjoy the stories very much. I recommend you download them from BlogD and treat yourself to his work. And I'm not just saying that because he's my husband. You can read the Fiction Alley feedback on his stories to see other perspectives.