So, it has come to this.
I remember it like it was just a few days ago: rashly, with no thought for the possible consequences, I posted a few remarks to this thread regarding my dissatisfaction after having read the first four books of the Harry Potter series.
Faint yet clear the replies came back to me, like the dim echoes from a tomb: “It’s all explained in book five;” “She addresses that point in Book Five;” “Book Five will make everything clear.”
And I smiled, secure in my faith that I would never have to concern myself with these trifles, that wild horses could not drag me back to that accursed series.
Yet less than a week later, as I wandered the stacks of the public library, I turned a fateful corner, my gaze chanced to stray across the Reshelving stacks, and there it was…waiting for me, its dust jacket seeming to grin as it gloated, “Don’t try to run. In your heart you know that there can be no escape.”
I would have cursed it, but that would have been insane, and it is unseemly to argue with inanimate objects in public. Instead, to demonstrate my lack of fear and to prove that I am a free-willed entity, I checked it out of the library and brought it home with me.
And here I sit, staring at this vile shoebox of a novel, which looks as long as the last volume if not more so, and remembering how that last book dragged on and on into infinity until at last it made me hate life and pray for the vengeful god of the Israelites to cleanse the earth with the fire of his wrath. What dark force drove me to touch the next book in the series? How did I get to this point? In the name of God, what am I doing?
Now at last I understand what Richard Dawkins meant when he spoke of the power of the ‘meme.’ This isn’t a series of books, it’s a mind virus. And you, each and every one of you are carriers, dripping with infection. You are all tainted! Do you see what you’ve done to me?
I hope you’re all happy now.
