Wow, when I saw the title, I thought you couldn’t wait till the first day of summer! Seriously. Even though I knew my S.O.'s bookstore is having a midnight Harry Potter Party.
Oh well…
Archergal, not the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan…
Add me to the count of people who haven’t read a word of any Harry Potter book. I’ve even been clicking on the spoilers if I run across them in threads, but as I’ve got nothing to base them on, they’re going in one ear and out the other.
I know there’s a kid called Harry, and he attends school at Hogwart’s, and he’s a devil-worshipping Satanist. I think.
A radio show out of Tampa supposedly has copies of the book and was reading chapters on the air this morning. They (those wacky morning D.J.'s, syndicated to St. Louis) said news crews were showing up at the station and their boss was freaking out. I don’t know if it was a hoax or not, but either way I’d imagine it caught Rowling’s attention.
I have it on order from Amazon.uk, so it’ll be a few days before I see it. But God I want this book, NOW!!! (Why should I read Americanized Harry Potter when I can get it from overseas so easily, after all?)
Americanized? How?
I haven’t read any of them. I know they’re suppoesd to be really great, blah blah blah, but they just have absolutely zero appeal to me.
They are only slightly changed from overseas to American. For example, in Britain, Mrs. Weasley can be trusted to send Harry some candy along with the jumper she sews. If Harry was wearing a ‘‘jumper’’ in American, he’d have to add ‘sexual identity crisis’ to his list of things to deal with.
Any book that has a character saying “Spotted Dick!” (Goblet, welcome back feast, Ron to Hermione, (bow to my insane memory of events and lines in the books)) is not bery Americanized. Really, I’d bet most people on here would know that spotted dick is a desert in the UK, but how many kids do? Very very few.
But Rowling insists that only a minimum of changes be made, and now that she’s a quadrabajillionaire they do what she says.
the “spoilers” listed in the first post, i really wouldn’t consider a spoiler. those are things that J.K.R. has stated in interviews for about 6 months or a year now.
YeeeHAW…it gets here before it gets to you folk in the US.
Suff…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaar.
And I promise not to post any spoilers, mind you, I DID hear on the radio this morning that Dumbledore gets the boot in this edition.
I LIKED Dumbledore. More than Harry actually. I’m not altogether happy that he got the death curse, but at least it wasn’t Hagrid, eh? That would’ve been completely awful.
Did you read the others out loud? I did, and there were some parts I wished I’d skipped. [Hint: somebody belching slugs.] But I told him he had to read the other two himself . . . and he did. Also told him he has to wait for the paperback of Phoenix. But by the time he goes back to school . . . he’s gonna know. Because second-graders–well, technically I guess they are third-graders now–not only don’t care about handing out spoilers, they can’t wait .
(Hmmm. Maybe I had better invest in the hardcover after all.)
Hey Kambuckta, don’t you think you should have put that in a fucking spoiler box? That is the definition of spoiling things buddy. The very defintion.
Add me to the list. I kind of skimmed the first couple of pages of the first one and found it to be really watered down Douglas Adams, and immediately lost interest. (Had it been full blown DA, I’d have kept on reading.)
Unless he’s, y’know, making it up. I may not have read any Harry Potter, but I can still spot a joke spoiler.
That was to Earl, not Tuckerfan.
Dammit.
I’m having trouble cutting and pasting here… I read parts of the others out loud. Eventually we just bought all of them for her on tape, so she could listen as much as she wanted to and skip the parts she didn’t like. Of course now the tapes are strewn all over the house, but she has listened to them over and over and over and kicks our butts at Harry Potter trivia. I may break down and buy her this one on tape or CD as I don’t think I want to read something that long out loud. She has already said we can spoil it for her if we want to.
Yeah, the changes are very small, but I just hate that they did it. It’s called context, or go get a dictionary if context doesn’t cut it. The solution for me is easy – order 'em from overseas. I don’t know what spotted dick is, but I bet they didn’t change that because it’s a well known “funny British word” and there isn’t a close American equivalent.
I’m not trying to say that they hurt the books any, but I’d rather read the originals, even if there’s an odd word or turn of phrase or punctuation somewhere. If I had kids, I’d rather they do the same. Call me a purist if you want.
I WANT THIS BOOK! NOW! NOW! NOW! kicking and screaming like a two-year-old
Um, I mean, I know spotted dick is a dessert, but I don’t know what goes in it. I could easily find out online, I’m sure. Just pass me some of those yummy digestive biscuits, please…(they really ARE, despite the name)…
While I’m not a huge fan of Harry Potter, I put in my order to Amazon because any publishing phenomenon that so discomfits fundamentalist Christians must be supported.
My general rule is that if the fundies hate, I’m going to like it.
I got my bets on Hagrid taking the dirt nap.
Even odds on Ginny or Colin.
I’m a fan of the books…not as big a fan as I am of Pratchett, say. But big enough that I’ve got my voucher sitting on my desk so’s I can take it down to the bookshop tonight. They’re having a release party starting at 10 and we get our books at midnight.
Bad news is that I have to move this weekend. Starting when I wake up on Saturday morning and continuing until I’ve got all me crap out of the house and into the apartment. If that happens by 10 pm Saturday night, I’ll be stunned.
And all the while that book’s going to be staring at me, whispering…
Can’t take it, I tells ya.
I’m not going tonight, but tomorrow morning.
As I’ve told the children, the less work Mommy has to do around the house, the faster Mommy can finish the book. 
I’ll probably read first, then when I get to a stopping point, let my daughter read until she gets where I am.