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[source: Warner Brothers]

The next time you complain about having a terrible birthday, whether forgotten or not going according to plan, please stop and think: is this birthday better or worse than a Harry Potter birthday? Unless you too are dealing with an all-powerful Dark Lord trying to kill you at every turn, your answer will be “oh, so much better, I can’t believe I was complaining, accio cake, please.” As if The Boy Who Lived wasn’t already dealing with enough, he couldn’t even look forward to July 31st, the one day a year that was supposed to be celebratory. Once at Hogwarts, not all of his birthdays were completely terrible, since you know, people actually remembered them, but even the best ones were filled with some sense of doom and/or gloom. But of the seven birthdays readers got to celebrate with Harry, which was the worst? From merely not terrible to angsty to his life was in mortal danger, here’s all of Harry Potter’s birthdays ranked from best to worst. Happy Birthday, Harry…we guess?

Has there ever been a literary character adapted to film and television as much as Sherlock Holmes? From the Basil Rathbone films of the '30s and '40s to Sherlock, Elementary, and Danny Boyle’s films starring Robert Downy Jr. and Jude Law, there have been many variations on Holmes and Watson. Heck, we even have a Sherlock Holmes Handbook for would-be sleuths. But what might the characters themselves think about these adaptations?

Photo by Michelle Oude Maatman on Unsplash

Season six of Orange is the New Black is about to drop on Netflix and we’re itching to see what books they feature this season. (Last season really threw us for a loop, though. We’ll count ourselves lucky if we see a single person reading at Litchfield this season.) To celebrate the return of this roller coaster of emotions, we’ve solicited some help from our favorite fictional librarian: Taystee Jefferson.

Image from RyanMcGuire on Pixabay.

“It was murder!” she wrote. The famous mystery writers on this list have two things in common: they were all successful women writers and they each led very intriguing lives.

Much like an unstoppable animated corpse that seeks on your destruction, the Mamma Mia film series has returned with a sequel, Mamma Mia! Here I Go Again. With Lily James, the star of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, joining the cast as a young version of Meryl Streep’s character, it’s hard not to imagine how a zombie-filled, ABBA-inspired musical might go. Probably something a little like this…

Photo by Joseph Ruwa from Pexels

Summer (hopefully!) means lazy days in the sunshine, relaxing with nothing to do but enjoying yourself…and getting sucked into some really great reading. While some may be lucky enough to do their summer reading on a beach, we’re big fans of opening a book in a hammock. Not only is this somewhere that you can really get into the lazy summer spirit, but you don’t have to get to a coastline (or deal with getting sand everywhere). Instead, all you have to do is lie back, relax…and immerse yourself into one of these incredible new offerings.