Random Question Friday: Characters in Literature

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of Random Question Friday! Before we get to the highly personal information, allow me to tell you a little story about me and Harry Potter.

I can't remember exactly when Harry Potter became a player in my consciousness, but I'm guessing it was sometime in my Amazon career – say, early 1998. I probably packed many, many copies of Harry Potter books, and I know that Amazon used to go to amazing lengths to order, acquire, pack, and ship Harry Potter books on time. It's almost (hell, not "almost" it IS) a competition to see which bookstore can best deliver Harry Potter books to customers' doorsteps on the release date. I won't get into details for fear of Amazon's hired goons knocking on my door, but I will say it involves impeccable timing and damn hard work.

So I was fully aware of the Harry Potter phenomenon from the retail and cultural standpoints, but I'd only read the first one. I tried to get into Chamber of Secrets, but that goddamn elf just annoyed me to tears and I put it down. I pretty much lost interest in Harry Potter as literature but remained somewhat amused by its cultural impact. I mean, when brilliant professor types get sustained and highly intellectual comment threads on the subject, you know it's a pretty big deal. It was simply a big deal that I wasn't all that interested in following.

Then I met Kathryn.

Kathryn likes Harry Potter a whole lot and she geeks out on Harry Potter in an adorable kind of way. During Thanksgiving we watched Prisoner of Azkaban with her entire family and I remember waking up with a question about all that Sirius Black business at the end of the film. It was one of those random situations where in pre-waking consciousness you ask a question, not fully aware of what you're asking. Sleeping across the room from each other, here's how the conversation went:

Trout: Hey honey, was Sirius Black a good guy or a bad guy?

Kathryn: Good. The book explains it better.

Trout: Okay. But people thought he was bad, right?

Kathryn: Yeah. Read the book.

Trout: [drowsily] Okay. Thanks honey. [snores]


This summer I decided to get some long-awaited fun reading done. I've been chipping away at Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, and I still love those stories to death, but I'm only about halfway through the third volume out of five – and in the meantime I wasn't reading anything else.

So last week I decided to take a break from all those lines and tacks and political treachery and "sou' by sou'west, sir!" stuff and give Harry Potter another crack. Pedaling my happy ass down to the public library, I skipped right over the elf and went straight to Prisoner of Azkaban.

Read it in two days.

I pedaled back down the next day and checked out Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. I'm right about halfway through Goblet of Fire, and although the first hundred pages or so were agonizing (do we really need that many pages devoted to Harry's muggle relatives? No. No we do not.), it's starting to pick up now. I'm thoroughly enjoying the character development, especially as Harry, Ron, and Hermione become full-on teenagers. My scientific genius bestest manfriend pointed out that he loves the books precisely because the kids behave exactly as teenagers do in reality: bad decision making skills come into play on a regular basis.

And so in reading Harry Potter I realized that it's perhaps cliche, but still true: we read to simultaneously escape and identify. Stories like J.K. Rowling's let us project ourselves into another existence and whether we realize it or not, allow us to pick up on characteristics similar to our own.

And that, readers, brings us back to Random Question Friday: with which character(s) from literature (we'll exclude movies because I'm a snob that way) do you identify? It doesn't have to appear in Harry Potter – it can be anyone from any genre.