Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Chapter 7

Mark True statements with a “T” and False statements with an “F.”

1. _____  Chapter Seven, The Boggart in the Wardrobe, begins in Potions class where Malfoy enters in bandages. He asks Professor Snape for help with his work on the Shrinking Solution – and Severus makes Harry and Ron do the hard stuff.
2. _____ Malfoy implies Harry is a coward for not hunting down Sirius Black himself instead of being in school. “If it was me,” he says, “I’d want revenge.”
3. _____ Professor Snape takes five points from Gryffindor because Neville’s toad becomes a lizard instead of shrinking properly.
4. _____ Professor Lupin takes the class into the Staffroom for a lesson about changing Professors into boggarts.
5. _____ A real boggart is in the Staffroom wardrobe and Lupin takes this opportunity to teach the class how to defeat the Shape-changer that tries to frighten its antagonist: laughter.
6. _____ Neville’s boggart turns into Professor Snape but he finishes him off with the Riddikulus charm and turning him into a lizard wearing a dress and a funny women’s hat.
7. _____ Ron is afraid of spiders but succeeds in defeating his boggart by using the Riddikulus charm and putting roller skates on its many legs.
8. _____ Lupin’s boggart turns into a “silvery white orb hanging in the air” which he defeats by using the Riddikulus charm and turning it into a cockroach.
9. _____ Harry is upset at the end of class because he wasn’t able to turn his Dementor boggart into anything; the monster scared him so much that he almost passed out before Lupin intervened.
10. _____ The chapter ends with Ron, Harry, and Hermione agreeing that Professor Lupin’s class was the best Defense Against the Dark Arts class they’d ever had. Hermione wishes she had had a chance against a boggart.

Share your answers in the comments boxes!

As discussed last Monday, Sundays at HogwartsProfessor will be given over for at least a few months to a ten question pop quiz on a specific Harry Potter novel chapter. The first quiz was about the Hogwarts Saga’s first book’s first chapter and I promised then that this week’s questions would be from the second novel, Chamber of Secrets. Which chapter, though, was I to choose?

By a happy providential gift, The Rowling Library issue dropped just as I was struggling with this choice, an issue with an interview Rowling did at the time of the second Potter novel’s publication. Jennie Renton asked her about the books embedded within her novels:

Imaginary books with great titles like Dragon Breeding for Pleasure and Profit are always cropping up in the stories. I wish they were real so that I could get my hands on them. And there’s an amazing bookshop in Diagon Alley, the street where wizards to to get their wands and what have you.

Rowling: I liked that bookshop best of all the shops I made up, with the possible exception of Olivanders (because I really liked doing his wands). If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want to be let loose in the wizarding sweet shop, I’d want to be let loose in the bookshop. When Harry goes to Diagon Alley for the first ever time, he sees a book on curses, Tongue Tying, Jellylegs and Much Much More – all this sort of stuff really amuses me.

Chamber of Secrets, like its parallel novel in the Strike series, The Silkworm, is a book about books. It even includes a chapter in which Harry and Tom Riddle, Jr., journey together inside a book that acts something like a Pensieve — and a ‘book-within-a-book’ plays a critical role. I mean, of course, the Dark Lord Diary-Horcrux slipped inside one of Ginny’s Lockhart textbooks at Flourish and Blotts by Lucius Malfoy. Rowling’s comments about her love of the Diagon Alley bookshop and this book-within-a-book theme made the choice of Chamber’s chapter four, ‘At Flourish and Blotts,’ an easy one.

No, I know these questions are not especially hard. The exercise is supposed to be a fun bit of reminiscence, not a trial. This is not an Open Book test, though! Knock yourself out on the ‘For Your Reflection’ question if your looking for a challenge. The questions follow; the answers are after the jump. 

Chapter Four: At Flourish and Blotts

1. What inanimate object at the Burrow told Harry to tuck his shirt in?
2. How many Gilderoy Lockhart titles are on Harry’s Hogwarts booklist?
3. True/False: While playing Quidditch with the Weasleys, Harry finds out that Ron’s Shooting Star is often outstripped by passing butterflies.
4. What does the O.W.L. acronym stand for?
5. Using Floo powder for the first time, Harry garbles his words and ends up in Borgin and Burkes, a shop in what magical place?
6. What did Mr. Borgin tell Malfoy the shriveled Hand of Glory could do?
7. True/False: Hagrid and Harry meet Hermione in Diagon Alley when she calls them over to where she’s standing outside Flourish and Blotts.
8. Which of his books was Gilderoy Lockhart signing in Flourish and Blotts?
9. After their short fight, Mr. Weasley had a cut lip, and Mr. Malfoy had been hit in the eye by what book?
10. Besides giving him his latest publication free of charge, what other unwanted bombshell did Lockhart reveal to Harry?

For Your Reflection: Though titled ‘At Flourish and Blotts,’ Chamber of Secrets’ fourth chapter only spends five of its twenty-two pages in the Diagon Alley bookstore. Harry spends more pages spying on the Malfoys in Knockturn Alley, who co-star with the Weasley family in this long and busy chapter. We do not learn until chapter 18 (336) via Dobby’s pointed hints to Harry that it was Lucius Malfoy who put Lord Thingy’s diary into Ginny’s used ‘Transfiguration’ textbook after his fisticuffs with Arthur back in chapter four. How did Rowling set up that crucial moment in Borgin and Burkes, in Harry’s conversation with Mr Weasley outside Gringott’s, as well as n the bookstore?

Answers after the jump! [Read more…]

Yesterday I posted a Sunday Night Quiz and promised to provide the answers with some explanation this morning. Scroll down for the answers; here is the explanation:

I am working on four books at present, reviving the online class I offered in 2017, and preparing talks for a local continuing education center for adults here in OKC, a series that will start in January. This is in addition to working three days a week at my ‘day job,’ helping my wife with her cooking business and online cooking classes (see MaryGranger.com for that), and writing here on a daily basis and a long form essay twice a month at the Hogwarts Professor Substack page. I’m in touch on a daily basis with Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers and Nick Jeffery and I talk at least once a week, largely about our ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast at the Substack site.

That’s a lot for an old man and I’ll be discussing each of these projects when there’s more to report.

Today I can share the simplest one of the book writing adventures: a Harry Potter trivia collection organized by individual chapters.

It started the year before Deathly Hallows was published when I was teaching Honors Freshman English at Valley Forge Military Academy. We read the six Harry Potter novels that school year along with most of the books discussed in my notes for what would become Harry Potter’s Bookshelf — Austen’s Emma, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, Shelley’s Frankenstein, et cetera. The cadets were hesitant at first but at Christmas break they learned that being expert in the Hogwarts Saga and attendant literature was a huge hit with every girl they met, the ultimate ice breaker. No complaints after that about the amount of reading they had to do…

Anyway, I started giving daily true and false quizzes about the reading assignments they had, quizzes that covered multiple chapters from which brief tests I could gauge who had and hadn’t done the work. My children enjoyed this much more than the cadets; they took the quizzes at night over dinner (and usually complained that they were too easy). They wanted a chapter-by-chapter quiz set that were actually questions rather than true and false exercises. I did a few of those for Order of the Phoenix but, in the madness surrounding the publication of Deathly Hallows, I let it slide.

In preparing bonuses for my 2017 online class, ‘Wizard Reading Formula,’ I found all those quizzes. I decided it would be a fun bonus for those who signed up to receive each week of the seven week course a set of quizzes for each of the chapters in one Harry Potter novel. My children and I, the three remaining at home then, went to town, so to speak, and threw together 198 chapter quizzes and one for the Deathly Hallows epilogue. I decided to throw in, on top of the ten questions for each chapter a ‘For Your Reflection’ discussion topic or essay prompt.

That last insertion proved to be no small addition. I never finished the project, though those in the class received the ten questions on time. It was a big hit with them and with my family but I put finishing the project (and my online classes aside) as I began my PhD studies and thesis writing. The only book I have ever written that might have universal appeal to Harry Potter fans has  been sitting in my filing cabinet ever since. 

My other two Rowling-related book projects are an expansion and adaptation of my Shed-heavy PhD thesis and a corresponding Lake-laden project that very serious readers will enjoy, the one a capstone project to my twenty plus years of “artistry and meaning” exploration and the other the first salvo in ‘Fourth Generation’ understanding of The Presence. I’m excited about those books, believe me, and I look forward to sharing chapters of each over at the Substack site as they are drafted and in a comprehensive online class in 2025.

Along the way, I’ll occasionally post a chapter from the trivia collection, usually on Sundays when I need a day off from posting. For the next six weeks, then, I’ll be sharing a chapter quiz with essay prompt from a different Harry Potter novel for your self-testing pleasure. Enjoy!

Answers to the quiz for Philosopher’s Stone, chapter 1, after the jump — [Read more…]