Found it in the mailbox at 9pm, after waiting for it to be dropped at the door all day. Just finished it (it’s 1am).
A worthy end.
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Pages: 784. Reading Time: 3 hours, from time of receipt to posting.
The scary part is you read at 4-5 pages per minute.
No wonder you have so many books.
If you slow down, you can probably knock a few thousand dollars off your fiction budget. ;p
Awww, that’s like cheating. You should’ve read it aloud for your kids!!! (if they are old enough)
Wow, you read it faster than I did.. I started at about 7 (pm), when I woke up.. just finished.
I thought it was a worthy end as well, an old friend once told me that you should read a book slowly; like a meal you need to taste to understand and enjoy.
He’s a liar though, as old friends often are. I know this because another old friend told me they should be read as fast as possible.
I watch movies in fast forward. Just because the chipmunk voices make me laugh. I don’t actually know what’s going on.
Dude, dont you have like an MMO/Virtual World to be programming instead of reading and posting about Harry Potter? WTF?
I believe most things should be experienced slowly because the journey is more fulfilling an experience than the reflection on the bookmarks scattered throughout the story of your life.
But I guess my aversion to structured, milestone-ready leisure is precisely why I find most RPGs disastrously boring.
On the other hand, I prefer to cheat my way through games to watch the cutscenes and cinematics. ;p
I haven’t even seen what the cover looks like. =P I’m intentionally waiting a while, and then I’m going to spend a day in Barnes & Noble. 784 pages sounds like about 7 hours for me. I should probably bring lunch.
[…] The last Harry Potter […]
Do all speed readers know what time it is if you interupt them to ask while reading?
I liked the third Harry Potter movie. I find it hard to believe anyone could take the books so seriously, though. They are like teenage-drama movies–they sell lots of copies while much more deserving fare goes unnoticed by the masses.
I have always read fast. Probably because I was taught to read at a crazy young age (my grandmother was a schoolteacher. Family legend has me reading at age two).
My pace is very dependent on interruption; if I pause to look up, I slow down by an order of magnitude and have to work my way back up again. When I am going fast, I don’t notice turning the pages and start freaking out people sitting next to me. I also seem to retain what I read.
We often joke that “for our next house, we’ll just move into an abandoned library branch. Leave the shelves. Hmm, leave the books too.”
Alas, my kids do not want to read the Harry Potter books for some reason. I think they are in backlash mode.
I worked on that until 1am on Friday, I get to read until 1am on Saturday night. 😉
Well, as you can see from the book review posts, I read a lot, and I am not at all snobbish about reading “young adult” material. There is stuff I would objectively call better written on a sentence by sentence basis. Book five was… flabby.
But there’s a quality to the world that Jo created that is full of old-fashioned sense of wonder and just purely delightful — a whimsy that is highly unusual in literature in general. She also managed to create truly memorable central characters (though many of the peripheral ones are too lightly sketched, IMHO). I don’t think the bashing is deserved either.
Does this happen to everything? I mean I stopped liking WoW just because it was popular. Maybe it’s a natural life cycle sort of thing, get popular, and then get killed by your popularity. Or something.
I was wondering if you’ve ever read the Wheel of Time? Given what I’ve read of your literary exploits, I don’t doubt it. I liked it better than Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings put together.
I read the first Wheel of Time book when it came out. I made it until Book 7, when I concluded that the series went nowhere. I think it was book five or six where the characters literally ended up, after 700 pages, exactly in the same place and situation they were in on page 1.
*snickers* Jordan is rather verbose… I’ve listened to all the WoTs on audiobooks (each one is approx 40 hours! That’s like err 500 hours or so?). After the first two books or so I’ve noticed it doesn’t matter if I fall out for a couple of hours as I used to listen to it when I went to bed. Ah, so nice to hear the neighbours 20 alaskian huskys howl while “reading” about the wolves in complete darkness. Literature is more than just text. Cut down on that speed, Raph!
What I find most interesting about the Potter series is that people relate to the Potter books in all kinds of ways. I heard the first one dramatized on the radio before it became famous, rather scary ending there compared to the movie… The Potter series becomes a lot better when read aloud, an even better when it is read by the excellent Stephen Fry as an audiobook! A good British actor does a lot for the content…
Does this happen to everything? I mean I stopped liking WoW just because it was popular. Maybe it’s a natural life cycle sort of thing, get popular, and then get killed by your popularity. Or something.
It happens to everything, but with a slight twist. At the end of a lifecycle, things either hibernate (go into a forgotten-by-everyone-but-a-few mode) or become commonplace (toilets, for instance, or pencils).
I had the wonderful fortune of seeing the book today. I walked by it on my way to the non-fiction books on Albert Einstein. =P
Ah, the joys of being able to read quickly… It really doesn’t take a lot of time to absorb what’s on the page of your typical novel.
Technical manuals and textbooks are something different since you need to take them a bit slower in order to really understand what they’re about, but a novel is meant to be read at speed. Biographies too.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in four and a half hours. 🙂
The other thing I’ve noticed though is that I lose patience with writers who can’t write distinct plots. Jordan is one of them. Stephen Erikson is another. George Martin is a third. When you have more than three plots or two sets of characters running at the same time, in my opinion, you’ve got too many plots to fit in one book and probably too many to properly fit into a series.
My advice to those authors: Pick a focus group for each book and maybe visit one of the “side plot” groups for a few pages every fourth or fifth chapter.
Also, find an editor who will enforce a smaller word count, thus dropping scenes, chapters, and (in the case of Jordan) entire books. That would make these people better writers, too.
I’ve never read any of the Wheel of Time books, but the Wheel of Time MUD was the first massively multiplayer game I ever played. ;p
Unfortunately, that really spoiled me though, as I could never find that sort of community and quality again in a MUD.
Ah, I still remember my first time in limbo…
The other thing I’ve noticed though is that I lose patience with writers who can’t write distinct plots. Jordan is one of them. Stephen Erikson is another. George Martin is a third. When you have more than three plots or two sets of characters running at the same time, in my opinion, you’ve got too many plots to fit in one book and probably too many to properly fit into a series.
A friend of mine tells me that most books are too simple for her, which is why she likes George R.R. Martin. *shrugs* Not every style is best for everyone.
Actually, moo, I know that I am probably missing out on a great number of books, but no one seems willing to tell me what exactly IS better than what I already read. There is a lot of junk out there, too. I found a website that has a top 100 list of science fiction, but I’m sure that there is at least one book that is great but isn’t popular or famous.
Yeah, but everyone wants a toilet. At least untill someone builds a better …errr… mouse trap.
Potter was written to be read quickly. I went through the first book in one sitting (which is quite odd for me).
On the other hand, something like Frank Herbert’s “Dune” or Norman Spinrad’s “Child of Fortune” is a week long reading adventure.
I think it’s interesting. JK Rowling creates worlds just like Raph does. Except, no offense, I think she does it better. But only because her medium has been around for a couple thousand years. I think the word to describe the world she created around Harry Potter is seamless, something no game has achieved.
Raph, I’d say give it 10 years before the technology is ready, and then start workin on the real Harry Potter MMO, where you can use spells the way they’re used in the books. Goddamn I can’t wait to raid Azkaban.
I am sad to say I was sorely disappointed by Deathly Hallows, probably more so than with Order of the Phoenix as this was the conclusion and thus more important. Rowling created some truly charming and life-like characters, and probably this is the key to the series’ success, but Book 7 has some major problems with plot and pacing, enough to break suspension of disbelief for me towards the ending.
I think this is a case where the fame, the pressure and the fandom got to the author and prevented her from writing properly. What ruined Book 5 for me was the all-too-obvious games she played with the reader regarding who was it that was going to die in the book.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Exposition
Family legend has me reading at age two
Me too.
Good read, although she really wrings out the whole Potter universe into this one book.
Those who say she could have used some editing are right, she could have tightened up the gratuitous cameos (especially the cameo corpses, that was just cruel), but I don’t really agree with those who say “the exposition” was a problem. The scenes that give the reader the past histories of major characters are the most tightly written and interesting of the whole book. Even the Bloody Baron’s history added something.
On the other hand, does the cameo from Sir Cadogan or the Whomping Willow really advance the plot at all? As a last nostalgic walk through the rest of the series, it works really well as fan service (and as a fan, I have to admit it was a lot of fun), but it’s the expository passages that do far more for the book’s literary value.
The sad thing is, tying up so many loose ends (and not introducing new ones) and explaining so much that was hidden, the whole series is less of an exercise for your imagination than it was in the past. There’s no darkness left on the map to explore. This can be a virtue in a series finale, it’s true. I wish there was more, but I’m not sure more would be better. This is a decent place to end it, and end it she did.
Still, the whole reason the series was compelling in the first place is the world seems to have a life beyond what happened on the pages with Harry, Ron, Hermione, et al. Rowling created a place we’d have liked to inhabit ourselves, that stretched to the horizon, whose boundaries we couldn’t see until now. It’s a playground for the mind. Leaving no stone unturned, no stones to turn for ourselves, leaves Potter’s world diminished. The waveform collapses; it’s not longer about possibility.
My big gripe with WoW (as opposed to UO) is the storytelling is so clearly laid out for you (and not very engrossing as a storyline) is that it doesn’t leave the same room for imagination. MUDs, like radio dramas, left a whole lot to the imagination; people stepped up and filled the gaps, using text and emotes — the same stuff the world was made of in the first place. WoW isn’t about possibility, it’s about beating the same path everyone else does, not beating paths for yourself.
In the end, though, “worlds” may be niche-y. Not everyone has the imagination and quick thinking it takes to really RP. Not everyone has the time to invest in creation. They want passive and linear entertainment, because if you put their entertainment into their own hands, they’ll turn out less like Harry Potter, and more like Dean Thomas. Or to put it another way, less like Luke Skywalker, and more like Uncle Owen. 😉
I like to read recreational books slowly, pondering every word. People who read fast remind me of people who wolf down their food instead of savouring every morsel. Thanksgiving meals in our family always made me think — they took all day to prepare but somehow were devoured in mere minutes.
Fast readers are the min/maxing powergamers of the book reading world. That being said, the Harry Potter books are a delight to read. It’s great to see children and people actually reading again. Even in America where according to studies, 80% of people don’t read regularily at all.
Reading fast doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t enjoy the book or fail to appreciate all the nuances.
Generally all it means is that you have more time to read and enjoy more books.
Reading fast also means reading intensely. It’s hard to describe, but it’s almost like the words lose their meaning and the whole thing turns into a movie instead… you *see* what’s going on rather than *read* what’s going on. Almost, anyway. 🙂