Please don't tell me how the last Harry Potter book turns out.

Starting today, the day of release, my husband and I will be going around with our eyes closed and ears covered whenever we come within range of someone who might be talking or writing about the outcome of the final installment. We don't want to know what happens until we get there.

For years we have had a standing date on Wednesday nights. We read aloud. We have read our way through a spectrum of fiction and nonfiction selections from The Blind Assassin to Lud-in-the-Mist, from the philosophy and science of Daniel Dennett and the religious history of Karen Armstrong to the Campbell-infused fantasy of Neil Gaiman. We did all of Jean Auel's last tome (which took us nine months and which a self-respecting editor ought to have cut in half), and we just finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

And we have done each of the Harry Potter books in turn.

By the time the fifth book came out, the level of fevered anticipation abroad in the land meant that it was talked of everywhere we turned. Yet somehow we managed to close it out. We accomplished the feat of not learning of the death of Dumbledore until we had read our way to the end of book VI, about six months after it was published.

Even if the way it all ends is common knowledge by Monday, we don't want to know. We will get there in our own good time.

So please, if you want to discuss it here, don't hold back on my account--but please include a *** SPOILER WARNING ***.

I won't even peek.

Thank you.

SapphireMoon

Last Edited on 21-Jul-2007 10:41 AM

My son eagerly opened it for me (Daniel is so helpful...what a kid!), but I haven't started it yet because our very small house has been full of the activity and noise of kitchen-floor mopping, carpet vacuuming, stove cleaning, litterbox scooping, an hour-long TV review show of Bollywood new-release music videos and movies (it helps me catalogue Hindi DVDs), and restless cats caterwauling (they hate noise that interrupts their naptimes).

The weather is gorgeous, so tomorrow I will betake myself to a chaise longue and sit in the shady, freshly-mowed backyard now devoid of 17-year-cicada carcasses (thank you, Daniel) or lie down on the now-cathairless carpeted living room floor with my feet up on the loveseat and muggle my way into Harry's last adventures. (Hmmmm, Deathly Hallows is 759 pages long. Will I be able to lie on my back and hold the book above my head? This plan might not work. I broke my nose three times trying to read Stephen King's It that way.)

I am one of about ten people in the universe who has not read the Harry Potter books, However, my wife owns and has them all, and, like CeeBee, she received the latest from Amazon this morning. She has already begun reading it. Seeing that, I threatened to read the last few pages and tell her how it ends. She gave me a look that would curdle the blood of a Master of the Dark Arts. (Yes, I've seen the films.)
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Rachel Pettit

Last Edited on 21-Jul-2007 9:16 PM

Mudge, these books are by no means great literature. And they are derivative in a number of ways. I also expect the fervor to wane rapidly now that the series has ended. There simply can't be the same appetite over the long haul as there was while the suspense was still high.

But anything that can have millions of youngsters and adults swarming to bookstores and giving up other pleasures in order to read is worth taking note of. They are a thoroughly entertaining experience and a true cultural phenomenon. We even did the midnight-at-Barnes & Noble thing for one release just because I wanted to witness that sweeping excitement over a printed book.

It is also curious to think that a book so heralded, the greatest best-seller ever, with millions of copies presold on its day of issue, outselling each of its record-breaking predecessors, instantly becomes the least rare book of all time. A century from now, even two, collectors will laugh out loud at the idea of someone’s trying to sell a copy of this book. It will be the copper penny of bibliophiles. Anyone anywhere who wants a copy will still be able to get one, some of them even still in mint condition. A book that would have been hot on the black market a week ago--and which reportedly was leaked like a top-secret file on the Internet on Wednesday--becomes in an instant, at the stroke of twelve the night before last, the most available commodity on the planet.