As her marriage and career went up in flames, Haillee Calhoun sought out wisdom and advice from a book that has guided her throughout her life. She hoped, this time, that its answers would not remain elusive.

Through her tears, she started once more at the beginning of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

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In hindsight, this satirical story was a little bit mean-spirited on my part. It’s a riff on the “Read Another Book” meme, which was born out of the over-use and over-reliance upon the Harry Potter series as a means of comparison for everything. The story was designed to illustrate the limits of J.K. Rowling’s series. 

via knowyourmeme.com

About

Read Another Book is an expression used to criticize the overreliance on comparisons to Harry Potter in mainstream politics, particularly by Resistance Twitter users. It can also be used similarly as a catchphrase intended to criticize people who use the Harry Potter series to compare real-world events to that of the books, frequently appearing as a hashtag in such posts across a number of social media platforms online, often by members of the Anti-Harry Potter crowd.

Origin

The use of this catchphrase appears online as early as 2016, though the exact origins are unknown. On November 12th, 2016, one of the earliest examples of such use appears in a tweet from Twitter^[1] user imbadatlife (seen below). The tweet, which uses “READ ANOTHER BOOK” alongside several examples of comparisons between Harry Potter and real-world political events, received over 16,300 likes and 7,400 retweets.

The tweet mentioned has some angry language, so I didn’t include it in the embed, but you can view it at the link above. In a similar vein, at one point, elite universities had to start putting out statements discouraging applicants from citing Hatty Potter in entrance essays, due to how frequently the story was being used by applicants. I enjoyed the series (both the book sand the movies) but I am a little uncomfortable about our very best and brightest universally citing the story in entrance essays.   

We have an entire generation of people who might be identifiable as the Harry Potter generation. My story above, mean and/or funny as it is, is my attempt to imagine one such person returning to the books during a bad patch in her life.