How dim is Harry?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 98398

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "arrowsmithbt" 
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:
> Our eponymous hero struggles with monsters, Dark Wizards
> and occasionally with his friends. Life is dark, desperate and
> seemingly without succour. In between all these shenanagins
> he makes fitful but apparently futile attempts to find out more
> about his parents and the circumstances surrounding the 
> events at Godric's Hollow.
> 
> Sometimes I get the impression that we feel more urgency
> regarding these questions than Harry does,  'cos he keeps
> making a pigs ear of it. He *always* asks the wrong people,
> or if not the wrong people, then at the wrong time, or both.
> 
> But there is someone he's never asked; someone who has
> already volunteered that they are in possession of a great
> deal of information about Harry - Hermione.
> 
> Oh, yes! Little-miss-know-it-all let the cat out of the bag
> in PS/SS chap.6 when she first meets Harry and Ron on
> the Hogwarts  Express:
> 
> "I know all about you, of  course - I got a few extra books
> for background reading, and you're in "Modern Magical
> History" and "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts" and
> "Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century."
> "Am I?" said Harry, feeling dazed.
> "Goodness, didn't you know, I'd have found out everything
> I  could if it was me," said Hermione.
> 
> Harry, being as thick as two short planks, never raises the
> subject again during the next 5 years.
> 

Oh, and is there something in the highly sanitized, extremely 
selective and glossing over some of the less pleasant aspects 
of the recent hostilities accounts of the Great War (they wouldn't 
have called it the First Voldemort War, would they) that Harry 
ought to know? From the quills of people who can't even say 
Lord, er, Thingy?

I doubt it.  Hermione was shocked to learn that Sirius and many 
others were sent to Azkaban without trial, she doesn't know why 
Rita Skeeter  has a low opinion of Bagman, she doesn't warn 
Harry that Macnair was once accused of being a Death Eater etc. 
No, I think those books are remarkable for what isn't in them.

There's only one person who's not reticent in discussing the 
Great War, and who actually knows something: Mad-eye Moody. 
Harry has no desire to hear about it from him and who can 
blame him. The kid was having nightmares already. And have 
you noticed that every time he learns a little bit more about his 
parents' deaths, his nightmares get worse? No wonder he's not 
asking questions!

I am a little bit curious about the books in the smallest bedroom 
on Privet Drive, the ones no one's ever touched. Where did they 
come from, do you suppose? The Dursleys don't seem like 
book buying types to me. Wonder if any of Lily's old school things 
are sitting on the shelves?

Pippin