However, the owls were good to me. A UPS delivery owl dropped off my copy of Deathly Hallows in the entryway to my apartment building some time before 6:30 Saturday morning (and placed it appropriately enough in a large spider web!). While I felt foolish checking so early in the morning and even more foolish standing outside in Mickey Mouse pajamas, I ignored my embarrassment, hugging the box to my chest and breathing deeply to hold back unexpected tears.

It was strange, but I felt the way I felt as a small child on Christmas morning in the days when Santa still left presents for me. I could not decide whether I wanted to open the box or not. I worried. Were the contents exactly what I wished for or was it another undesired pair of socks disguised in a festive box?

Overcome by too much anticipation and too little sleep, I did not open the box that morning. Instead, I slept, beginning the book only when I felt rested enough to do so and finishing the last lines late Monday night. And, although I had a few complaints (mostly concerning the epilogue and the treatment of a favorite character), I felt satisfied with how the story ended.

Of course, as a girl with a never-ending reading queue, I did not dwell too long on the end of Harry’s adventures. By Tuesday evening, I was prowling the local bookstores and libraries again, returning home with two books from Curious George and a tote bag full of books from the Boston Public Library. I must confess, however, that I have not given up on Harry quite yet; the Japanese-language edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was among the library books.

Then, this Saturday, I found myself seated on the T next to a father and son on their way to see the Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix movie. The father was as excited about the movie as the son, it seemed. Although the father, as a non-native English speaker, was struggling with the characters’ names, he knew the plots of all of the books and movies and was happy to reenact favorite scenes with his son.

Ordinarily, I would be annoyed about people talking and laughing loudly on the subway. But, this time I smiled. When I looked around the subway car, my fellow passengers were smiling as well. For a moment, I wondered if I had discovered and boarded the train at Boston’s own Platform 9 3/4.

Before Harry Potter, I, like most adults, led a boring reading life. I never stayed up past my bedtime to read one more chapter or one more page, unless I was forced to do so. I skimmed and scanned and read in fits and starts. And, when I read deeply, I focused on analyzing and critiquing the words before me. I could never imagine being seen in public with a children’s book. Instead, I spent my commute and lunch hour poring over newspapers, work-related reports, magazines, current events books, and novels that needed to be read for book group.

But, the day I picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at my public library, everything changed. Suddenly, I remembered that there were other ways to read (and other reasons for reading). I rediscovered pleasure reading and the joy of shared reading experiences. I became reacquainted with my favorite childhood books, finding comfort in the fact that the library’s children’s room was not an Eden from which I was forever banished, but a place to which I could return to whenever needed.

In almost a week’s time, the Potter phenomenon will be over. However, adult Muggles should not despair. There are other books and other imaginary worlds to explore, and there are librarians, booksellers, and other readers’ advisers eager to guide you.

And, if you would rather savor the last days of Potter-mania, than think about the post-Harry Potter future, there are many opportunities to reminisce, rejoice, and create. For example, you can wile away the days until the final book release with Matthew Reidsma and other cartoonists as they draw a different Harry Potter character each day.

My new morning routine, for example, includes a quick glance at the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) Book of the Day. This gadget, which I recently added to my Google homepage, displays a different book from the ICDL’s collection each day. Although the selections are often contemporary books in languages other than English, on occasion, older books are featured.

This week I discovered Marianne L.B. Ker’s How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings. Ker’s 1872 children’s book tells the story of a fairy named Violet who loses her wings in an accident and earns new wings through her service to a dying girl. In between losing and winning her gossamer wings, Violet meets the Fire-King, the Snow-King, and a magician, among others. Beneath the melodrama and Victorian sentimentality, there is historically interesting commentary on man’s relationship to the environment, urban living conditions, and the restorative power of nature.

Now that I have frolicked with the Fairy Violet among the flowers, I wonder what interesting characters ICDL’s Book of the Day will bring to my breakfast table next?

• Asian North-American Children’s Literature About the Internment: Visualizing and Verbalizing the Traumatic Thing / Fu-jen Chen and Su-lin Yu
• Sense of Loss, Belonging, and Storytelling: An Anglo-Indian Narrator in The Borrowers / Ariko Kawabata
• The Pedagogy and Problems of Jane Andrews’s The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air (1861) / Laureen Tedesco
• Serial Monogamy: Extended Fictions and the Television Revolution / Margaret Mackey
• National Identity in a Multicultural Society: Malaysian Children’s Literature in English / Christina M. Desai
• Leap of Faith: An Interview with Max Velthuijs / Victoria de Rijke and Howard Hollands

• Japanese Picture Books / Jane and Bill McCullam of Cattermole Books
• “When the myth of life began our people shared life with humans, stone to earth, fire to water, trees to sky”: Multiplicity and Commonality in Hiromi Goto’s Water of Possibility / Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
• “The Art of Emptiness”: Buddhist Nature in picture books of Miyazawa Kenji’s Donguri to Yamaneko (Wildcat and the Acorns) / Helen Kilpatrick
• Walking Along With Nature: A Psychological Interpretation of My Neighbor Totoro / Rieko Okuhara
• Analyzing Ideology in a Japanese Fairy Tale /Jane E. Kelley
• A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Illustrated Japanese Folktales / Yukiko Tosa
• Anne of Green Gables and Japan / M. Elizabeth DeBlois

There is also an article on Philip Pullman: Elaborately Wound: Philip Pullman’s Marlowean Muse / Lisa M. Miller

This issue was the one that I hoped to submit an article to but did not have time to draft something before the submission deadline. The articles that were submitted and selected are much better than anything I could have written, though.

• Paying with Shadows / Laurence Yep
• The Cultural Production of Asian American Young Adults in the Novels of Marie G. Lee, An Na, and Doris Jones Yang / Monica Chiu
• Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice / Rocío G. Davis
• “The sound of bamboo planted deep inside them:” Reclaiming Filipino American History and Identity in Lakas and the Manilatown Fish / Melinda L. De Jesus
• Writing Chinese America into Words and Images: Storytelling and Retelling of The Song of Mu Lan / Lan Dong
• Negotiated Identities and Female Personal Space in Thai American Adolescent Literature / Rahpee Thongthiraj
• Toward a Poetics of Asian American Fantasy: Laurence Yep’s Construction of a Bicultural Mythology / Celestine Woo

This issue also includes book reviews for the following books:

• Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature: a handbook
• Dime novel in children’s literature
• Clever maids: the secret history of the Grimm fairy tales
• Brown gold: milestones of African American children’s picture books, 1845-2002
• Important books: children’s picture books as art and literature
• Elusive childhood: impossible representations in modern fiction

These articles are available online to Project Muse subscribers only. Check your local library for access to print or electronic copies.

“There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different … But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive … to read long, dull, and difficult books.”

–Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

Recent acquisitions include

• Oxford companion to children’s literature / Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard
• From cover to cover: evaluating and reviewing children’s books / Kathleen T. Horning
• Growing up with Dick and Jane: learning and living the American dream / Carole Kismaric
• Miffy’s surprise party / Dick Bruna
• Betty Crocker’s new boys’ and girls’ cookbook