Sorry babe, I gotta Ishbail.
Warner Bros. / Via itwasjustapromise.tumblr.com
Mallory Ortberg for BuzzFeed / Keely Flaherty
Bazmark Films / Via if-youcantsleep.tumblr.com
Mallory Ortberg for BuzzFeed / Keely Flaherty
Put on your Time-Turners, and be prepared to be blown away.
Fun fact: Radcliffe destroyed almost 80 wands throughout all of the films because he pretended they were drumsticks.
Getty / George De Sota / Ian Gavan
Fun fact: Hermione's last name was almost "Puckle," but was later changed (thank goodness).
Getty / Hulton Archive / Ian Gavan / Stringer
Fun fact: J.K. Rowling was extremely close to killing Ron. In the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 DVD commentary Rowling said, "I planned from the start that none of them would die. Then midway through, which I think is a reflection of the fact that I wasn't in a very happy place, I started thinking I might polish one of them off."
Getty / Ian Gavan / UK Press / Mark Cuthbert
Fun fact: Tom Felton's girlfriend, Jade Olivia, played Draco's wife Astoria in the film, but required some "arm twisting" by Felton to take the part.
UK Press / Justin Goff / Getty Images / Ian Gavan
Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall , remembers his childhood home of Hawaii and the first time he met the man fighting to save the “Garden Island.”
Will Chancellor
Will Chancellor
I lived on Kaua'i, Hawaii, in the early eighties, before Walmart and traffic jams, when the biggest store was Big Save. Kaua'i is the Garden Island, and on the north shore it rains hard at least once a day. When the skies cleared, my mom and I would follow a rusted-out railing to the beach. Here I'd dig around the looping cursive of tree roots imagining the swamps of Dagobah from Star Wars, hunt for crabs on the rocks, or dive for creatures in the tidepools.
The Kaua'i my family moved to was wary of development. Locals seemed to realize that the arrow of "growth" only points one way, that no one ever undoes a big-box-store economy, no one de-develops. After a high-rise hotel went up in the sixties, residents passed an island-wide ordinance that "No building should be made taller than a mature palm tree." Kaua'i adopted a precautionary principle with respect to external development, saying in effect that there needs to be a clear benefit to local culture before anyone messes with paradise.
As such, Kaua'i was a remote place to live, and, like most other transplants back then, my family moved back to the mainland before I started elementary school. Even though it was only five years, living on Kaua'i shaped us. The first lesson I was ever taught was aloha 'aina, a reverence for the land that gets inside you — the same connection to the natural world stressed in ecofeminist literature, the same love for wildness found in deep ecology. That lesson stuck, and led me to major in environmental policy and work for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. A love for the island stuck with my family as well and we went back whenever we could.
Class discussion? How about not, though?
These are all great books and the value of teaching them is vast, but discussing them in a class where you're the only black student is a much different experience. It can lead to embarrassment and moments where you become the teacher yourself, and may inspire unintentional aggression in defending your POV.
Any black student whose first introduction to literature also coincided with attending a predominantly white educational setting, more often than not meant they read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This would also be your first experience of a teacher asking people to read aloud passages so your classmates saying the n-word could be forever burned in your mind.
Tom Sawyer is basically a walk in the park compared to having to be the only black person in class when it's time to say "N****r Jim" all seven hundred thousand times it's in this book.
Everyone loves a story about kind and gentle slaves! So much, that The Economist had to pull a review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, because the reviewer stated: "Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains."
It's really hard to talk about slavery in general in a class discussion, especially when books go to great lengths to whitewash its evils.
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7 Brutal Literary Breakup Texts