Harry Potter Cures Cancer

I meant that to read like a fake headline and not as a fact. But also kind of as a fact.

Since the dawn of time, people have been too lazy to read books. So people put those books on tape. And sometimes when they are teaching their eldest son to drive in their minivan, they play those tapes to entertain the younger child in the back seat during these drives. Thus was my introduction to Harry Potter on tape.

(Before we proceed, I will never stop saying "book on tape" even when you give me a nice little word conglomerate like "audiobook," because it harkens back to a simpler time, and sometimes it's fun to get all old fashioned.)

The books really were on cassette tapes, which I played on my little stereo before bed almost every night during late middle school and high school, before I got really emo and started listening to The Early November. Now they sell them on CDs, and you can find the entire collection, all 7 books, on Amazon for $286.52. Which is down from $454.80. (Or you can scoff at anyone who thinks it's fair to charge that much for something that could be transmitted to a computer as data, and download it. (I said SOMETIMES I like to get old fashioned. I reserve the right to be completely contradictory when I went to be.)

But you should buy them, because the books are narrated by Jim Dale, who is a British voice phenom, and I like to think some of the money gets back to him. On the Random House web site, you can hear what he sounds like by playing the "guess which character is speaking" game on the right. (I ruled at it (No duh.)) As crazy as it is to think J.K. Rowling thought up hundreds of really fleshed-out characters, equally impressive is the way Dale gives them voices. And he doesn't just "do a voice," he creates the EXACT voice that you hear in your head when you read the books. It's like if your mom or dad or grandparent who read to you when you were little had book-reading superpowers.

He's a genius, and I'd like to take a moment right here and thank him for getting me through a lot of rough spots in the past couple months. There have been days after chemo where I'm someplace between too tired to keep my eyes open but restless enough not to fall asleep, and I've put on HP on and just been... comforted. (Ugh, Harry Potter nerd/sentimental overload all up in here.)

So thanksssssssssssss (that was "thanks" in Parseltongue), Jim--You'll never read this, but I owe ya one!