Gee they couldn’t have waited two days. The Times said this:
New York Times book editor Rick Lyman defended the newspaper’s decision to run its review before publication.
“Our feeling is that once a book is offered up for sale at any public, retail outlet, and we purchase a copy legally and openly, we are free to review it,” a spokeswoman said.
“We came across a copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ at a store in New York City and we bought it.
“We took great care not to give away the ending, nor to give away significant details about who lives and who dies, confining our review -- which, incidentally, had extremely high praise for both this final book and the entire series -- to broader-brush assessments of the tone and the writing.”
Again it seems to me they could have waited two days.
Someone at work said they’d call up and cancel their subscription. I tend to agree with that.
My brother asked if he thought people would be reading the books in fifty years. (I don’t think he’s much of a fan). I said I think people will be reading these books in a hundred years or even two hundred years from now. Tomorrow is the end of a literary event that doesn’t happen very often. People will be able to say yes I was around when the last Harry Potter Book came out. Don’t expect to see anything like this anytime soon again. Harry Potter will be the benchmark that other series will be measured against.
Just because the last book comes out does not mean the books will stop selling. There are still two more movies come out. And in a very short time we will be coming up on the tenth anniversary of the first book. Then I figure sometime starting in 2025 or maybe even sooner the kids who grew up reading the books will have kids. Their kids will be just about the age when the they started reading Harry. And so it will continue to grow.
I’m about 200 pages into Order of the Phoenix. I probably won’t start the last one until sometime late next week. Now the thing is to figure out how not to know what happens. Wish me luck.
2 comments:
I have to say, I think I'm on Ed's side on this one, and I'm a bit sceptical about the staying power of these books. First, my disclosures: I've never read any of the books. Second, I'm a literary snob. I think there's a difference between being a good seller or popular and being, well, good--in the sense of enduring literature.
For example, I loved "The Hobbit" and liked "Lord of the Rings" books, but I don't consider them literature--just popular and entertaining reads. I suspect the Potter books will be the same. But none of us alive now will make that determination--generations yet to be born will decide.
To me, it doesn't make any difference, really, whether these or any other particular books "endure", and I don't care whether the Potter books are "really" good or not. I'm happy to see people reading fiction of any sort--from trashy pop fiction through to mass fiction through to the classics. Read anything that gets the mind imagining and verbal faculties going, I say. We'll just have to let the future make its own decisions.
Oh you elitist muggle.
Part of it is the age old problem of because many people like something; it can't be good.
I happen to think both Lord of the Rings and the Potter books are good literature but then again as you say neither one of us are really going to be making that determination.
And, as you also say, the most important thing is that people are reading. It is always interesting to take the subway to work and see what people are reading.
I was on the subway yesterday and there was another person reading Order of the Phoenix. It will be interesting to see on Monday how many people will be reading Deathly Hollows.
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