The Half-Blood Prince

It was on May 15th of this summer, when I was wandering among the bookshelves of the 10th floor of the library, that I accidentally and surprisingly discovered the Amarican hardback version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

I'll never forget the good old days of my summer vacation afther I've finished my first yeah in high school. I travelled to my hometown Changchun and stayed with my cousin for about a month. I've already heard of how amazing the Harry Potter series was, I have a friend who was a hardcore Harry Potter fans, and I've even watched the movie of Philosopher's Stone. Though envy or proud or something, however, I resist to read those "trival fairty tales". Hence, when I heard that my uncle had bought my cousin the English version of the first four volumns of the series and these were on their bookshelf, I pretend to act indifferently.

However, curiousity had eventually beaten everything, and I began to read the series, started from Philosopher's Stone. At the beginning, I was quite a bit nervous, for I have hardly ever read a novel without a single Chinese character before. The first chapters turned out to be a little too hard for me, actually, but meanwhile I began to be attracted by the plot line and determined to read on. After finishing the first book, I had been deeply attracted to the fantasticly lovely story, thus cannot help beginning reading the second book, then the third and the fourth. I was eager to read the fifth volumn, but the English version wasn't available then.

One amazing effect that worth-mentioning is this. I spent a whole week on Philosopher's Stone, five days on Chamber of Secret, four days on Prisoner of Azkaban, and only three days of Goblet of Fire! Considering each book is longer than the previous one, it indicates that my speed of reading was increasing at blinding speed during this less-than-3-week period!

It turned out to be astonishingly effective. Since then, I could read whatever material in English at unparrelled speed. I had trained myself to use my sense, rather than vocabulary and grammar, to understand what I was reading, and to take phrases, sentenses, lines, rather than individual words, into my eyes at a time. All these contributes to my legend in the testhall of NMET English.

Looking back on the days two years ago, I can say that my being the best English learner of the whole class, and probably the whole school, is largely due to the days I read Harry Potter series.

After I entered university, I was soon selected into Level-3 class, a class for the top five percent elites in English, but I still dare not say that I'm the best of all time in the College of Physics and Engineering. Then I spent the winter vacation at Changchun, and had an opportunity to read Order of Phoenix. This time, I spent only two days, although this book is even longer than Goblet. After returning to Zhuhai, I began to read English books that are related to academic. The first few books I read are Thomas Calculus and a volumn of Linear Algebra from an unknown author. Through these I taught myself a lot about how to use English to describe maths and physics.

Now I've read several scores of different English books, both in maths and physics. It's by then that I dare say that I've become the best English master in our college. And I have to thank for Harry Potter again, for this.

In fact, I've had a chance to read Half-Blood Prince when I was in Changchun for the English version could be bought by then. However, it was much too expensive and I didn't think it's worthy buying one myself. I planned to read it when I could borrow one, and forget about it for arbitrarity long time if I couldn't.

There, now, I've got it. So I'm reading it. I haven't finished it, but I promise I'll write something about it later.