I love the Harry Potter books. But I've never been that interested in the larger fan community that surrounds the HP universe. Ive never been to that website JK Rowling set up, and aside from showing up at a midnight book release for book 7, I've not interacted with fandom at all. 
 So, I reviewed the Chamber of Secrets the other day and when I posted it, Goodreads sent me this email congratulating me for reviewing that book. It's the only time in my 400 or so reviews that I can recall ever getting a letter of congratulations. I thought something was weird, so I followed the embedded link in the email and ended up on my regular 'ol review page. 
 On that page, it had this little thing that showed me what some of my 'friends' thought of the second book. I noticed that someone I am friends with mentioned that the consensus was that the second book was the worst of the series. 
 I was honestly surprised to hear that. I liked it a lot. What I've been doing is reading the book, and then upon finishing, watching the movie and seeing what I think about the adaptation. The first two books were very faithfully adapted - and the second book in particular, appeared to be an almost complete copy of the book itself. I've never seen anything as dead-on reproduced on screen that way before. 
 It's not like I was comparing them on purpose, but each scene appeared to be lifted directly from the book fully formed, the only change I noticed at all was where Harry & Ron were taken to the spider monster in the forbidden forest near the end of the novel. And even there, it was pretty close... just some of the action and dialog was different, the spirit of the scene was still intact. 
 And that was the biggest deviation I found. I mean, again, I wasn't looking for it, but damn, it was so dead on. I should point out that I think I watched an extended version, as there were scenes I don't recall ever seeing before, and it was nearly 3 hours long. 
 Anyway, the digression was meant to point out that the differences between book 3 and the movie 3 were pretty big... odd that this turned out to be my favorite movie in the series... and possibly my least favorite novel. 
 That isn't to say it isn't great, it is, but less so than I thought it was. But I think I had been letting my love of the movie cloud how I thought of the book. This one isn't quite as strong as the others, in my opinion. 
 But what it did do was give me a pretty fun time-travel romp, which, to be honest, isn't easy to do. Of course this raised all sorts of questions about why time-travel isn't used again later in the series when it was almost certain it should have been, if it were possible (maybe it was touched on in the books later? I can't remember). But the later ramifications aren't relevant when it comes to this particular story. 
 Which reminds me, I did try to write the ultimate time-travel romp a few years ago. And as an FYI - it was an unmitigated disaster - that stuff gave me such a headache that I put the story away and don't intend on pulling it out again to try to fix. I may not even try to write a time-travel romp again. It broke my brain a bit. 
 Which makes me think that if backwards time-travel is ever turned into a usable technology then life on earth will be wiped out almost immediately. Of course, then no one ever travels back to wipe everything out, and life goes on unabated. 
 Wait. Dammit. If no one goes back in time and screws everything up then someone would invent the tech and go back and destroy us all. Which of course means no one ever goes back in time to destroy stuff. Therefore, we're fine. 
 Shit. This is the kind of crap that made me throw my story in the trash. I'm breaking my head again.