When I was 10, my family and I went to Pakistan so we could attend my uncle’s wedding. This trip would be my first time back there since I was five. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this trip but my mom tried her best to make me excited by telling me stories of her childhood in Pakistan. Hearing these stories made me happy and I became less and less reluctant on going.
Saying that Pakistan was a culture shock to me would be an understatement. I began noticing the drastic differences immediately as I stepped off the plane. Although it was mid November, it was still sweltering hot outside. There were people screaming, cars honking, and garbage everywhere. The man at the currency exchange tried to scam us by lying about the exchange rate and the taxi driver dropped us off three blocks away from our intended destination. For me, this trip was nothing how my mom said it would be.
One day, we were getting ready to take a train to Islamabad, which would take six hours. We stopped at a bookstore to look around before our train left. It was there that I saw a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I never enjoyed any of the Harry Potter movies and I was discouraged from reading the books by my teachers. However, it was the only book in the store that was in English, so I picked it up and reluctantly began to read it. Little did I know that this book would soon change my life.
Before this assignment, I would have probably said that Harry Potter didn’t change my life. I already loved to read when I found Harry Potter in fifth grade. I had loving parents and friends so there really wasn’t a gaping hole that J.K. Rowling’s words could rush in and fill.
However, after finishing the whole series, I realized that I had...
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... earnings for at the end of the day” (Lanich).
Works Cited
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Lanich, Michael. "The Legacy of Harry Potter: Charting His Global Rise and What It All means." Thespotlightreview. The Spotlight Review, 4 July 2011. Web. 20 Jan. 2014
Schoefer, Christine. “Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble.” 13 January 2000, http://www.salon.com.
Zipes, Jack. “The Phenomenon of Harry Potter, or Why All the Talk?” in Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Goff, Patricia. Producing Harry Potter: Why the Medium is Still the Message. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006. Print.
Bassham, Gregory. The ultimate Harry Potter and philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010. Print.
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