This past summer, when the final Harry Potter book came out, I decided to read the whole series to my kids. When I told them I was going to do this, my nine-year-old daughter shrugged her approval—my six-year-old son wanted nothing to do with it. He announced that he would not be joining us, that he “hated” Harry Potter, that the story was “stupid,” even admitting all the while that he had never experienced a word of it.
And so I started reading Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone to my daughter, with my son in the other room occasionally announcing to us that he was not listening; then asking every once in a while to remind him who a certain character was; then crawling up onto the bed with us; then protesting with his sister, loudly, when it was time to stop reading for the night. These kids were totally into the book!
By the time I read the final chapters of Sorcerer’s Stone, my kids were leaning forward on the bed, eyes like saucers, staring at me so closely, it was like they were trying to analyze whether I might one day get skin cancer. And something occurred to me:
Man, this is some serious pressure!
The entire outcome of the story, though it already has been written by J.K. Rowling, was now in my hands! What if I stumbled over Rowling’s difficult-to-read-aloud wordplay? What if I pronounced somebody’s name wrong just when the stuff was hitting the fan? What if—what if I started laughing?
That’s actually what I did. My kids looked so ridiculous, to be honest, staring at me like that; so cute! But they weren’t looking at me. My face was merely the movie screen on which the images in their mind played out; my voice was merely the voices of the characters. In short, I had never seen them look at me that way before. So I started laughing from all the crazy pressure.
“Why are you laughing?” they asked, confused. We were not in a funny part of the novel.
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