Being a librarian, I am of the "Hey, ANYTHING to get kids to love reading" bandwagon.

I started reading it because it was hypocritical not to do so. I gave it 1 chapter. I'm still hooked. It is one of the better books out there for adults and kids. Rowling knows how to spin an addictively entertaining yarn.

Plus, any excuse for a good party, be it midnight or two am! Whoot!

All said though, I kind of wade through the fanaddicted junkie gradeschoolers and teenagers with a bemused smile and tolerance, since, hey, if it were Elfquest (My own personal downfall) , I'd be dressed up and drooling along with them. LOL

The media, I'm hopefully learning to ignore, since they can be the literary equivilant of hyenas or buzzards, squawking, screaming, and collecting around any large kill for a piece of the action. (Jaded, me? Naaaaw!)

Oh, and uh...I'll be picking up my copy after work today and spending the rest of the day speed reading it....all for the sake of my job you understand. LOL LOL!

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"Spider sense....tingling."

An upside down 9-5, that's kinda cool.
I will be getting the book and I am on a wait list. When I get it, I get it.
I like to enjoy a book and not race through it. Right now I just finished Interview with a Vampire. Which incidentally, am I the only one who wanted to slap Louis constantly throughout the book?
So Harry will get his turn, in the order I plan to read him. I like the story alot, but that series is not as serious an addiction for me as say, oh I don't know, Anita Blake?

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Stardust

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. - Agnes Repplier

When the last Harry Potter book came out I stood in line at Borders at midnight to get my copy of the book. That line was soooooooo long. Now that I think about it I don't know why I did because I'm JUST reading the book now and am only about a quarter of the way through it. As for this one that just came out I did get it but I didn't wait in line at midnight this time. (After working for 15 hours the last thing I wanted to do was stand in line for a book that I'll probably end up reading months later the way I am.) I went to Borders this afternoon, waited in line for about 2 minutes and bought the book.

As far as the whole Harry Potter thing goes though, I love it. I think I saw the first movie and loved in then instantly bought all the books up to that point. I think the world that J.K. Rowling has created is amazing. It's one of the few things that I've read or seen that I wished I could be part of that world. Besides that how can anyone criticize anything that is getting kids to read? People bitch and moan about how kids spend too much time in front of a TV or computer or how they play too many video games. If a book can keep them away from those things for a while it's a good thing. Granted for many kids it would be great if they went outside and got some physical activity it would be great too, but that's a different topic all together. Look at all the people that were inspired by the books written by J.R.R. Tolkien or other countless other writers. At some point I'm willing to bet there will be some kid that grew up reading the Harry Potter books and will be inspired to create some that will capture the imagination of the next generation, just as Rowling has done.

I'm with Tengu on this, I rarely read fiction these days as well. Non-fiction, stuff on healthcare, ancient civilizations, spirituality (includes new age, occult, etc) and religion, that's my main fare. It's more stimulating to my mind, as I find it's rare to find good SF/F fiction these days, particulary seeing so much is just a glut of franchises and formula writers. I've also come to hate ongoing sagas that run in stupid circles and never lead anywhere except to frustration, like Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth cycle. At the fourth book, I gave up. Terry Brooks' new Shannara books have fallen to a tired and true formula that are terribly predictable. And as for SF...no, I won't go there.

Never read Harry Potter, don't want to. Had the premise summarized to me once, and don't like it. I'm a very picky bitch.

Sure, I'm happy children are reading. But I hate the price they're putting on the books (list price, $41, but they'll sell it cheaply for $23). I know a lot of children here that just can't afford that much for a book. But isn't it more about the profits, really? I've seen the merchandise that goes with the books--same deal. Rowling is a billionaire by exploiting children's love of the books. Noble? I think not (as you can see, the spirituality books are starting to really alter my view of the world, even moreso than it was). I'm just so disgusted with inequality.

As for Interview with the Vampire, I read it when I was 13. The religious and philosophical concepts were good, but Louis really needed a good kick in the ass. Speaking of that series, that went down the shitter the second Anne Rice became "famous". Memnoch the Devil seemed like a pointless modern day ripoff of Dante's Inferno, and it was so ... well, IwtV was written contrary to mainstream beliefs, which made it attractive. Memnoch was written in a way to change the entire tone of the damn series to turn all the wayward vampires toward salvation and redemption. Pampering to the masses--and most of her books from then on have been crap, doing the same sort of thing. Fan service, writing for the money, not for the art. (Ironically, Eddie Van Halen seems to have fallen into that pit as well, for those who have compared the band's two latest releases with the great music on VH3, which was panned to death by the fans).

Well, now my brain hurts again. Literally, I just woke up from a migraine breakout. Man, you guys make me use my cranium way more than I should.

Katse

Bought the book for 22$ at costco, then came home and read 'Blood of ten chiefs'(My sis is an elfquest fan and left it here) Go figure. Prefer Mercedes Lackys stuff over HP anyway

Yeah, Louis bugged me, too. LeStat was okay, and the next one if there was one, but I stopped after Queen of the Damned -- she'd told her grand story, and I couldn't be bothered sitting around while she hauled out the same old egotistical and narcissistic character without any of the ones I did care about.

Potter lost part of my interest at book 4? 100 pages describing the campground and the quiddich match; should have been done in 50. How many pages in a run through the ministry basement?

Rowlings has gotten caught up with the grand tale with many morals and the culture, and forgotten how to tell a story. She says that she expects her readers to get older as the characters do; the final books are written for young teens. Some of the events and the length of the books, sure, but she's forgotten something: as the reader gets older, the book should become more subtle, not less.

Yep on the profits. I've been told that they sued that store in BC as a matter of principal because if they didn't, they'd be setting a precedent that they'd not insist their release dates be respected, but it still comes across to me as a hype and profit.

Russian Prison Tattoos? Someone wrote a book on them? Someone decided that that book was a good use of library resources? I agree with them. In moderation. It's gems like that that make people prowl the shelves for something interesting, and gets them away from the latest diet or self-improvement craze. It's an antidote from the censors who try to feed us CanLit and history as facts and figures.

Still, I don't read much non-fiction these days. I read more for escape and insights than for facts.

I used to read non-fiction; my parents encouraged me to get a new author and/or a non-fiction book every time we went to the library. But I got tired of the same old demonstrations of stuff I knew and was too practical to see prison tattoos as interesting. Documentaries usually bore me.

After two weeks, I finally stopped dragging myself through The DaVinci Code on Friday, after maybe 70 pages. Mystery. Run. Find clue. Decipher clue. Confusion. Run. Stray fact about Paris. Make bad decision. Correct it. Brilliant bit of planning. Brilliant bit of forcing luck. Extra layer of consipiracy gets added. Stray fact about art history. Repeat. Throw in a handsome woman and older man and lost family for leavening.

Then I went to Bujold's Paladin of Souls and devoured it in a weekend. Not as good as Curse of Chalion, but still caused me to pause and think several times. They made me think about the big pictures and big deeds done by small, reluctant people, and why the people would ever volunteer. About repetition on the large and small scale and how the key details of historical events really don't matter to the average citizen. History is written by the victors. I'm so glad that Bujold and Moon and other middle-age women are writing fantasy; they write, not about young people gaining experience and coming of age, but about experienced people using their experiences.

Next on the list is Laurie R King's The Game. Should be a fun romp. She's an author I have to be careful with; her books can leave me dazed for days. Real people, real fear. When I look up from one, my living room seems less real than the sewers under Cairo or the religious conclave of a madman. Her Mary Russel books, though, generally end positively.

I'll still read the new Potter by the end of the summer, maybe in parallel with another low-interest book, or on holiday. Hubby and some friends got together to pre-order copies from Amazon and he'll be bringing it home tonight.


Edit: Just read some blurbs from the front of the new King book. Mary wasn't under Cairo, she was under Jerusalem.

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Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

I read the first 4 HP books. A friend of mine loaned me the 3rd one, which was the one I started with, and I remember wondering what all the fuss was about because it seemed quite unremarkable. Then, a while later, I read the first one and thought it was really entertaining.

Perhaps they have to be read in order, although I don't recall anything being hard to follow in the 3rd when I had no other HP background to base things on.

Anyhoo, I think I enjoyed the 2nd book too. I got quite frustrated with the 4th book - parts were overlong and dull, and Harry's behaviour was getting annoying. Perhaps it's just a realistic teenager thing, I don't know. But if strange things happen for the 4th year in a row, and all the previous times people ended up trying to kill him and change the very nature of the magical world, isn't it odd that he decided that people would think he was nuts if he told them about it?

Perhaps with publishing deadlines, and what must be huge pressure to deliver, she's paying less attention to the telling a story part.

Perhaps I will get around to reading the 5th and then the 6th book at some point.


I'm not reading much these days - I should be reading some improving books on asp, .net, javascript and vbscript. There never seems to be the time...

Currently reading "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett though, and enjoying it as I usually do enjoy his books. It is reliably well written and has his usual attention to human nature and detail.

After that I'll be starting on the latest Artemis Fowl book.

Very mainstream, I know, but Terry Pratchet deserves his reputation and Eoin Colfer is still creative. I love the technological world of fairy magic.

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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny."

I have just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince not too long ago, and I have to say that I loved the book. It may have a sad ending (and I won't say what happens) but I'm looking forward to Ms. Rowling's 7th and final installment when it's published in two years.

I've stopped being a Harry Potter fan since Book 5. I didn't like it - parts of it (and Book 6) read like bad fanfic.

I'm not even going to go near what she's done to the pups!

Book 6 seemed to have all sorts of pairings in it that were there just because she wanted them to be - no rhyme or reasoning.

Previously good characterisations went paper (Tonks - who I quite liked in Book 5, but was cardboard in Book6).

I'll be reading book 7 when it comes out - just for finalisation (and the hope that Sirius does come back from the veil and he and Remus go off into a sunset an dlive happily ever after

Megs

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"When I'm old, I don't want them to say of me, "She's so charming." I want them to say, "Be careful, I think she's armed." -G. Stoddart

Fluffy isn't original. He's based off of Greek mythology. Cerberus, I believe. He guarded the gates of Hades and either had 3 heads (along with a serpent's tail, which was poisonous) or 50 heads (3 was much more common, I think only one Greek tale described him as having 50 heads). He was, of course, defeated by Hercules (Heracles).

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What if there is a spoon?