harry potter and beowulf

I'm reading beowulf--for the first time since high school. I vaguely remember hating it back then...when I first read it. To be honest, I liked very little of what I read for high school. A friend, Bison, and I were talking about this as we drove home from school--neither he nor I had been huge readers in high school. this means that we are both very much (almost embarrassingly) behind on various books that any literate citizen should have read by now. He has never read them. I read them and didn't like them, which may be worse than not reading them at all. Red October, Beowulf, Chaucer, almost any thought of shakespeare makes me cringe a little...this is not good. I am an english major graduate student. How did this happen?

Well, I've decided (namely because I have to take the literature GREs in the near future if I want to continue in this field) that I need to get up on literature. My brother knows more literature than anyone I've ever met (if only he could take this test for me!) so I'm borrowing his books and slowly working my way through.

It's amazing...I'm rereading Beowulf--and love it. It's action-packed, I can see the play-by-play, the characters are awesome. Why is this? Age? Maturity? Interest? I don't think so. I actually think it's Harry Potter. Ever since I started reading these sort of ridiculously great Harry Potter books, everything in my reading world has changed. (I realize this may effectively sound like "harry potter changed my life!" which is a bit sad)--Really, it's something about seeing the scene and caring about the characters, and engaging in the book. For some reason, the HP books were the first books I let myself really engage in. And then I reread narnia and loved them...and now the classics.

This may sound really weird, but I think I had this distorted notion (for awhile) that Christians shouldn't let themselves get into fiction and love the characters, because it's taking away from the real world and makes them forget about the real things going on here and now--i.e. it's just another form of escapism like video games, movies, etc. I'm starting to wonder if that idea is really bad theology--I once heard Eugene Peterson say something along the lines that Christians, more than anybody, need to believe in the imagination, after all, we presume to structure our lives around a God who's invisible.