Privet Drive from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Privet Drive . . . . . jun 24 2003 7:47 — bookish82.dat

"The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive."

So begins Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [buy at amazon] . by J.K. Rowling, and I think it's safe to say that never before has a sentence been read by so many people, with such a sense of happiness and fulfillment perhaps bordering almost upon relief, and in such near-simultaneity.

We didn't watch much TV in my family when I was growing up, and I still remember meeting a bunch of kids when we moved to a new town, at a party in the summer after we all had graduated from high school. Although we might easily have read some of the same books as children, everyone was trading stories about Clarabelle the clown, a character in a television show named, if you can believe it, "The Howdy Doody Show".

Fortunately (I feel sure that it's fortunate) today's shared experience can be of a good book that nearly everyone has read. It's a quiet first sentence, but almost immediately the scene of quiet is shattered as terror, discord, intrigue and mystery take over, all in the space of just a very few pages.

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