I’m a HP kid too and I feel the exact same way. I also refuse to feel any kind of way about it. It is absolutely possible to separate a book from an author, and you are allowed to love these books.

Some of my other “comfort” books are the Winnie the Pooh stories and The Tale of Desperaux, but I always go to HP first.

I’m very sorry for your loss.

Oh, interesting. I could see that. I think the ending bits were some of the more interesting to me, but interesting to me because they were so mundane. We know that Nazis and collaborators escaped and/or were allowed to live their ordinary lives in obscurity. We know that families carried shame and trauma for decades.

One of the most impactful but tiny bits for me was how a love can mean so much to one person (because their life was so short) and to another, it was only a memory because they had a full, rich, varied and long life. That stuck with me, how memories and feelings can be so static and fluid at the same time.

Wish I’d started reading Austen and Brontë in my 20s when I first fell in love, not when I was a bored teenager who didn’t want to read classics for lit class

This book was amazing.

All the Light we cannot see

I really loved this book. It’s such a good depiction of what living with loneliness and low level depression can look like - but also what life can look like as someone who is just a little “different” than mainstream. I love these characters. A Man Called Ove, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, maybe even The Helpline. Similar vibes.