Book Beginnings on Fridays

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a meme hosted at Rose City Reader designed to feature the book you are reading right now by sharing the first few lines of the story.

It seems that I’ll be continuing a Friday trend for a while. Last week it was Sorcerer’s Stone, and this week, I’m about a hundred pages into J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

number four, Privet Drive.”

It’s a rather nice symmetry of sorts to the opening line of the first book, though it doesn’t draw you in quite as neatly.

Here’s the summary, taken from Goodreads:

J. K. Rowling continues her phenomenally popular Harry Potter series with yet another tale of magic, mirth, and mayhem. Like its predecessor,Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is chock-full of fascinating characters, frightful events, and fun wizardry.p

The Dursleys were so mean and hideous that summer that all Harry Potter wanted was to get back to the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and WIzardry. But just as he’s packing his bags, Harry receives a warning from a strange, impish creature named Dobby who says that if Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts, disaster will strike.

And strike it does. For in Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor, Gilderoy Lockhart, a spirit named Moaning Myrtle who haunts the girl’s bathroom, and the unwanted attentions of Ron Weasley’s younger sister, Ginny.

But each of these seem minor annoyances when the real trouble begins, and someone – or something – starts turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects… Harry Potter himself?

Rowling packs this tale with plenty of adventure and action, keeping the pace fast and furious. There’s plenty of humor, too – both subtle and bold – as well as a few moral lessons. With overlapping themes that range from the simple to the sophisticated, Rowling’s Potter tales should appeal to readers of all ages – the young as well as the young at heart.

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